Copyright © 2017 by The Van Santana Limited Company All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Advance reading copy, 2017

We sat there by the pool, me shivering from being soaked and naked, the marble turning my ass to stone, and Horace puffing a big cigar, staring at nothing.

Only a moment before, we’d been talking. Then came the lull.

“What’re you thinkin’ over there?” I asked.

I pressed my palms flat on the warm wet concrete edge. Liked the feel of it.

“Huh?”

“You know I hate those fucking things,” I said.

Horace grinned. “Yeah. I know. I know.”

More silence.

Then he chuckled and coughed.

“What?” I asked.

“It’s just funny to me.”

“What’s funny?”

“You’re the one who got me started smoking.”

It’s true. We were about … shit, I dunno. Thirteen? Maybe I was fourteen. He and Plum and I would hang out and smoke cigarettes that Plum bought from a store near their house that would sell to underage buyers. Before that, I  stole them from my mom. We smoked them in the woods by my house. There, or behind the church.

But that was life on the Jung, that thick hellhole of green and blood. And smoking’s a big part of making it in that place.

“Well, okay, yeah, fine, whatever, but I’ve tried to get you to quit too …”

He smirked.

My skin was goosey and drying out in places.

“Will you get me a fucking towel already?” I asked.

“Is there something wrong with your legs?”

I pouted, swished my feet around in the clear blue water.

“Dude, you know what your problem is?” he asked.

Oh fucking great, I thought. Here it comes. That famous Horace wisdom’s gonna get dropped off.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“You need to loosen up.”

He’s right. I was living my life in knots, one close to another, forming a sort of chain of knots, similar to what would happen to my shoelaces as a kid.

My introspection was interrupted by a spray of water across my face.

“Motherfucker …” My makeup was already fucked but still. It’s startling.

“See,” he said. “Too uptight.”

I slicked back my hair, it having flopped down in my eyes.

“You’re looking kind of skinny, too,” he said.

“Hey!” I flicked water at him. “Asshole!”

“What? You get super skinny when you’re stressed out. You stop eating.”

It’s true.

“Yeah, well, be that as it may, don’t fucking comment on my body, okay? I don’t talk about you when you’re ballooning up and down and shit …”

“Awight, awight …” He looked down at the water.

More silence, save the flowing of the water.

Horace fished his hands around in the pool.

I lapsed into memories of us as kids, playing together in his grandparents’s pool, sometimes during the blazing Jungle noons, sometimes like this in the quiet repose of darkness.

“Wanna cigar?” he asked.

I rolled my eyes.

He raised his eyebrows, looked at me.

“Why the fuck not,” I said.

He climbed out of the pool, his three-piece soaking wet, shoes making that sloshing sucking sound shoes make once doused.

Horace fetched a cigar from a table by the pool. He grabbed a cutter and lighter too.

He fixed up the cigar, handed it to me.

I put the big brown thing between my lips and leaned forward.

He just stood there.

“You gonna light me up here?” I mumbled.

“Oh right, right …”

That reminded me he’s pretty damn chemmed out. He’d been drinking and dropping all day long.

“Here ya go, schweethawt,” he said in some kind of affectation. Bogey, I guess it was supposed to be. We were both addicted to 21st Century shit. Bogart’s 20C, but you know what I fucking mean.

I rolled it around to even out the cherry. He’s right. I was the one who got him started with all this shit and those instincts were still there. Those kind of instincts never really go away.

Horace snapped the lighter shut, then threw it and the cutter over his shoulder in the direction of the table. He took one step to his right and hopped feet first back into the pool, again sending water all over me.

I shook my soaked head with downturned lips.

“Loosen up,” he said. “Life’s too short.”

I knew that he knew it well. Ada’s gone. Dealing turned into deconstruction. Bye bye, Ada. And that left Horace and Crow and Weasel. ‘Course there’s the new Wendy, too.

“Tell me something about this new gal, Gwendolyn,” I said.

“You mean the third Wendy?” He smirked.

“Yeah,” I said from a stinky cloud of smoke. I fanned at it as though someone else were producing it close to my face without permission.

“She’s cool. She’s tall. Doesn’t take any shit from anyone … kind of like you in that way.”

“I’m not tall.”

He smiled. “People seem to think you are.”

I shrugged. “Sounds like the right kind of lady for you,” I said. “You need somebody to hold your ass to the fire every now and then.”

“Yeah,” he said, drawing out the word almost to a whine. “She’s pretty curious about you, too,” he said.

That piqued my interest, narcissist that I am. “Oh really?”

“Yeah, she’s always asking me questions about you.”

“Wait, how long have you known her? I thought you just met her.”

“Well … that’s complicated.”

“Fuck man …”

“Yeah, I know, I know …”

“Does she know?”

“Parts of it,” he said.

“Well don’t you think she should know all of it?”

“Not yet,” he said. “I’ll get around to it when the time’s right.”

“And when’s that gonna be?” I asked.

“I dunno.”

I sighed and smoked the fucking cigar, kind of out of things to say. This wasn’t the first time we’d been down this road. Most of what I had to say had already been said. It wasn’t my business anyway, best friend or not.

“How’s Lila doing?” he asked.

“She’s fine,” I said. “She’s perpetually unhappy with herself, and I guess I’m perpetually dissatisfied with some aspect of our relationship.”

He sniggered. “What else is new.”

“Hey, now, I said perpetually. I think that shows some self-awareness …”

“Yeah …”

More silence.

My mind wandered into life with Lila.

Our everyday had become a kind of grind. It was all taking care of Mason and getting me ready for work. Night time was still fun. Kinda. But it too slowed down. Had a lot to do with how tired we were and how Lila was feeling about herself that day. And I was relentlessly fucking critical. I mean fucking relentlessly critical. It’s like I just couldn’t turn the faucet off.

“How’s it workin’ out?” Horace asked.

My attention snapped back, and my kinny kicked on. Fancy neural upgrades started to decode his body language and movements. I saw something in there about distraction but dumped the cache. I wasn’t interest in secret shit tonight. I just wanted to be with my best friend.

“How’s what?” The cigar’s slack in my mouth, getting all gross and soggy.

“Chillin’ out naked.”

“Oh …” I looked down at my bare body then glanced over at my wet dress, balled up on the mossy marble. I sighed ‘cause it’s an expensive fucking dress. Then I recalled having said something earlier about having never been naked in a pool and not wanting to die without having done something like that. We’d been through some wild shit in the Jungle, but somehow no skinny dipping. Horace used to do that kind of shit on the reg, but not me. Why not? Too uptight.

“It’s fine,” I said. “Colder than I would prefer. And a lot less rockstar than I imagined.”

He smiled.

I sighed, yanked the cigar from my mouth, gave it a stare like it had personally affronted me, then tossed it in the pool.

“That’s pretty rockstar,” he said.

“Oh yeah? Why’s that?”

“That’s like a five hundred bit cigar you smoked for ten minutes and then just tossed in the pool.”

“Oh shit …”

He laughed.

“It’s cool, it’s cool,” he said. “Loosen up.”

I stretched my arms overhead and then pulled my hair back into a ponytail. I twisted it around once then dropped it over a shoulder.

The stars caught my eye in the stretch.

“Do you think there’s a heaven?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “I do. I do.”

“You think there’s a god too?”

“There’s something,” he said. “I dunno what, but something.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I think so too. I get pretty confused about it, though.”

“Well it’s heavy shit.” He twirled his cigar. “I’ll tell you something I know for sure,” he said. “There is a hell. Several, in fact. And they’re not hot, they’re cold.”

My shivering body attested to it. “I believe you.” I rubbed my arms. “And heaven?”

He looked hesitant.

“C’mon. It’s me,” I said.

“Well … it’s just what I think, okay?”

“Of course.”

“But to me heaven is getting to be with everyone you want to be with just the way you most want to be with them, all at once. And nobody gets upset or anything. It’s all okay.”

I saw it then, through his words, the threads of such a grand tapestry. I felt it in the moment, too, that we’re together like that. Like I wanted.

“I love you, Horace,” I said.

“I love you, too,” he said. “I love you, too.”

We sat there for a long time, together in silence, waiting for Plum’s wedding. I felt the weight of the moment and wondered if Horace felt it too. But I decided to let it be, to let the weight float, and to, you know … loosen up.

I walked down the street near my office, my House of Secrets, face shielded from the sun by my Panama hat, my chest feeling some intake from the breeze.

Dwizaal’s at it again.

“You’re going to break soon,” D said. “It’s all coming down.”

“Yeah, yeah.” I said it out loud, softly.

I knew D was me. But I held onto the idea he might also be something else. We’d also made nice a bit and were feeling better about being together.

I looked over the faces of the people I passed, my kinesic register telling me their secrets. That’s how I made my money, mostly, by eating secrets people gave me. Because of that, I caught secrets all the time, even when I was trying to take a relaxing walk down the street. Most secrets, I simply dumped. But sometimes they’d stick with me.

I saw a Brim about fifty paces down, clad all in black as I used to be, face pale and lips dark, muscles tight in the longcoat, eyes hidden under the fedora.

“Whatup,” I said as I passed them.

I felt their tension and saw their surprise. It was plain, even without my kinny.

I smooched at them and watched their surprise turn to sneer.

“Aw, loosen up,” I said. “Life’s too short, trenchy.”

I felt their impulse to stab me. Also their inhibition. They were prohibited from touching me, a fact I’d come to be quite confident of, despite the absent of any formal reassurance from their Director.

We passed like ships, I guess you’d say. Went on our own ways.

I reached the end of my route.

At the corner near my office, I saw Café Tredici. It was some other fucking place that went out of business a couple of months back. There was a bomb out front and then this deal with transdimensional anarchists, a couple of whom I also slept with in a shed across the street. It’s this whole thing. I could go into more detail, but it would take something like a hundred thousand words to tell it right.

Anyway, it’d become Café Tredici during all that jazz and reopened a couple of weeks back.

I walked in, tipped my hat back, let some of my hair loose. I smiled at the barista who’s name I’d learned was Meghan.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey,” I said, trying to be nonchalant. I gave a little wave.

“Same as always?” she asked.

“You bet.”

I could feel the gulf in the turns of our lives. She’s about twenty. I’m … well, let’s just preserve my vanity a little bit and simply say that I was older than that. Midlife, would be my guess, but how long will one live? The difference was less apparent to her, I think, in part because the sands of time had been gentle on my skin, and I’d kept some interest in what I wore, something time often strips from people without their knowing.

“Doing anything exciting this weekend?” Meghan asked. Her eyes looked like a cat’s.

“Not really.”

“Well, we’re having a grand reopening this week,” she said, wiping a glass with a rag. Yep, it’s the future and people still do that. #everythingfails. “You should totally come by.”

“Yeah,” I said. My pulse quickened, and my fancy eyes started to display all sorts of information about her. I couldn’t read any of it, though. I was immersed in my own feelings of desire and the cold guilt that crested like a wave in my muscles. Things weren’t good between me and Lila. They’d gotten a lot worse. Then better. Then worse. Then better. Like that. For a while. A good long while.

“Yeah.” I said it again, watched her wiping the mug. Or glass. Whatever the fuck it was. “I’ll try. If not, I’ll be back on Monday.”

“Sounds perfect.” She smiled.

I smiled weakly back at her, took my coffee, paid her, and left.

Outside I found air again. I hid my feelings in my steps and in my look. But inside, I was coming apart.