Dying Well: A Comic Novel of Revenge

By Tom Markus

Ben is hell bent on revenge. On both of the bastards. He’s got the motivation, he’s working on getting the means (in addition to the gun), and he’s got plans for how to get the opportunities. But he doesn’t have a lot of time left, and he can’t tell his buddy Jack. Worse, he can’t tell his ex-wife. Double worse, he’s conflicted. Is it the right thing to do? Is it the moral thing to do? He knows he can write about it, but can he, at age 75, actually do it?

There are laughs and tears in this spiraling tale of a retired academic on the road of revenge. Sprinkled with quirky characters, not least a cane-wielding 79-year-old whose outrageous rants ignite the conscience and delight the ear, this is the the tale of Ben Silverman who chases his own tail from Salt Lake City to Denver to Philadelphia in the hope of Dying Well.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tom Markus
• Release date: Aug 25, 2020
• ISBN: 9781005010492

Tom Markus

Tom Markus has written books on theatre (A Novel Approach to Theatre, An Actor Behaves), an ex-pat’s reminiscence (The Cairo Diaries), a college text book (Another Opening, Another Show, 3rd ed.), and plays that have been produced in America and internationally. He has worked in theatre as a director and actor from Broadway to Hollywood, and he has taught at Yale, University of California, Flinders University of South Australia, and the American University in Cairo. He is retired (undefeated) and lives in San Diego. Dying Well is his first novel. www.tommarkus.com

Book preview

Chapter 1:

Tuesday, October 13, 2009 – 1:50 PM

Ben was happy he was working up a sweat, so he dialed the speed up to 2.5. He concentrated as each foot landed, listening for how to spell the sound his feet made on the treadmill. Pa-flonk, pa-flonk, pa-flonk, pa-flonk. Ben frowned his eyes into a squint as he concentrated, then slowly shook his head. Nah, that wasn’t it. How many years had he been trying to find the true way to translate that sound into letters that he could shape in his mind and pound on his keyboard? Well, pa-flonk sure as hell wasn’t it, wasn’t any closer than chun-gop, chun-gop, and he’d given up writing that one a couple of months ago. There’s got to be an onomatopoeia for it, he thought, and then he smiled, remembering Leslie’s ninth birthday party and how her eyes teared in joy as she opened the envelope that he’d sealed with the dark green wax she’d told him was her favorite color when he’d chosen it at random for her fourth birthday. He and Kay held hands and watched their daughter unfold the parchment paper with the calligram he’d drawn by hand, his gift to her for her ninth year’s precious word. How do I say it, daddy? He remembered teaching her to pronounce ah-no-mah-toe-PEE-ya, and watching her twirl around the dining table that was piled with green-wrapped gifts and the three-tiered cake and paper plates that stood at the ready, sing-songing her new word over and over as she’d whirled toward them. She’d hugged him tight around the neck and whispered, Thank you, daddy. Onomatopoeia is my favorite present.

You gotta lose weight or those size thirteens are gonna break the damned treadmill. Ben welcomed the sharp laughter that followed. His best friend Jack’s trademark cackle had always pierced Ben’s reveries and brought him to the present, and Ben shrugged and nodded to Jack in agreement. He did need to lose a few pounds, Ben knew, and that’s why he was pa-flonking.

He watched Jack settle his stocky seventy-nine year old body on its usual seat on the stationary bicycle. Jack’s short legs barely reached the pedals, but he’d said long ago that didn’t matter, because he never for an instant gave a thought to pedaling. Ben remembered that when they’d first met on the troop ship, decades before, Ben had looked down from the arrogance of his lanky six-foot-three frame and lightly mocked Jack’s height, only to be blistered by Jack’s fiercely pugnacious reply that five-foot-six was plenty tall enough for a banty rooster. Ben was taken aback, but then Jack laughed. It was the first time Ben heard Jack’s mischievous, cackling laugh, and Ben never knew how or why, but he understood in that instant that he’d found a friend who would go life’s distance.

Kay teased when she saw them walking together at a distance that they looked like an illustration from Cervantes’ novel, and she called them her Kewpies, her affectionate riff on the Q in Quixote and the P in Panza.

Jack surfed idly through the TV channels, and they both watched a shapely young woman towel the perspiration from her arms as she headed for the door. She was the last to leave the exercise room that afternoon. Jack called after her, If God intended man to sweat, he’d never have invented air conditioning. Jack cackled as the door closed behind her. He was happy she was gone. He didn’t like intruders on their workouts. He loved to just perch on the bicycle seat, read the newspaper, and zing wise-cracks at Ben while his chum did his dailies.

Jack wasn’t a doer, he was a commenter, a quipper, the kind of guy who delighted in insulting total strangers, taking refuge behind the crook-handled cane that kept his aging body vertical, not to mention that he fantasized whacking the aluminum shaft down on the head and shoulders of anyone who challenged his right to insult them. He also depended on his sibilant speech to win the compassion of strangers (well, yeah, the new dentures weren’t a perfect fit, so what about it?) as well as the high cackling laugh that punctuated his taunts and that he counted on to divert any overflow of anger from his victims. In good weather—and it was good enough nearly eight months a year in Salt Lake City—he’d sit on his favorite bench in Liberty Park, cool under the shade of a plane tree, and read the morning Tribune while lying in wait for a jogger. When the morning’s first red-faced, towel-wrapped, grunting, and overweight accountant plodded by, Jack would call out, If you’re that late, man, take a taxi. And then he’d laugh.

Ben’s pace was steady. Not fast, not running, and definitely not sprinting like the youngsters who punished the treadmills mercilessly after they got out of their white-collar offices at five. Their dreams of living to Jack’s seventy-nine provoked the thirty-something generation into hour-long workouts before they gorged on a dinner of KFC and French fries with a side of fry sauce. Ben was a smarter eater, and with his long strides, Ben was a smarter walker. Twenty minutes each day. Incline 1.5. Speed 2.5. That’s enough, he’d tell himself. Enough to keep stamina, strength, and flexibility for whatever was coming next.

He was pretty certain what was coming next. Hell, he knew damned well what was coming next, but what he hadn’t decided yet was what would come before what was coming next. He’d been thinking about it for nearly nine weeks, ever since he’d had what the AARP Magazine called the life-changing meeting with Dr. Keller.

Lying awake at night, his wife Kay deep in opiated sleep beside him, he’d been working out the motives, means, and opportunities for his revenge. He knew his motives. They had festered in him since Kay’s accident, since the beginning of her pain and his nightmares. He knew his two targets. They didn’t have anything to do with each other, didn’t even know each other, but Ben knew them. Their names were burned into his retinas: Dieter Dienster and Jonah Parsons, names he would never speak out loud. As for opportunities, Ben thought of himself as a man who made his own, and in the late night hours he’d puzzled out in careful detail how he’d create his opportunities for what was coming next.

Today he’d get the means for the first.

There’s only two words to describe what’s on this TV, Jack quipped, un-watchable. He held the remote up with two hands, the way cops held a pistol on a TV show, and thumbed it once again, going ka-powee each time he changed channels. Ka-powee! A commercial for insurance flashed on. Ah-hah, Jack yelped, "That’s what I need, life insurance!" And then he laughed.

Ben couldn’t remember how long ago he’d heard it first, but he always enjoyed Jack’s mocking the folly of what he described as life insurance for immortals. Jack punched the mute button. I forgot to tell you, he said. I went into the Beneficial office on South Temple a couple of days ago, just for the mischief of it. Well, it was hot out, and I knew it’d be air conditioned inside while I waited for the bus, so I talked with an agent about taking out a million-dollar term life insurance policy. He was a youngster, short haircut, probably pretty fresh out of college, and I could see him salivating at the commission he could earn. I led him along with how I could pay whatever the premium would be with just a wire transfer, and I got him to where he was actually filling out an application form. He asked me if I had any pre-existing medical conditions, and I told him I hoped it wouldn’t be a deal-breaker but that I’d been diagnosed with an irreversible case of mortality, though the doctors assured me it wasn’t acute and that there were no imminent symptoms. He was a very earnest kid, but a very low-watt bulb, and he duly wrote ‘mortality’ into a blank space on the form.

Where do you come up with these? Ben laughed as he trudged forward toward nowhere.

"I’m not making this up, Ben. I almost skedaddled out the door, giggling, when he took it into his supervisor’s office for approval, but the bus wasn’t due yet, and then he came out of the office with a perplexed look on his face that I wish I had a camera with me. He told me everything was OK because they’d checked Beneficial’s printed list of pre-existing medical conditions, and mortality wasn’t on it, so he’d gotten the go ahead because anyway I’d have to have a standard physical exam to get approved. By now, I’d gotten him thinking he was my buddy, my confidant, my advisor, so I asked him if—as a friend—whether or not I should actually buy a policy, what with the actuarial tables revealing I was immortal. He was eager as all get out to make the sale, so he might not have understood me, and anyway by now his head was turned around backwards and he couldn’t keep up with my Chicago flim or my flam. I told him not to worry about the mortality because there are more people alive on earth today than have died in the entire history of the human race, even back to the biblical Hebrews, so that actuarially the table showed that I wouldn’t die, and statistics don’t lie, as I was sure he knew from his training program with Beneficial, and what did he think I should do? A little laugh burbled out of Jack at the recollection, and Ben kept on stepping out. He was pretty flummoxed, and I started to have a heart—which might have been a first for me—so I gave him one of my phony business cards, the ones I had printed up when you were with me at Kinko’s, the classy ones printed in blue ink that say Falwell Foundation, Philanthropy for the Unborn? Then I told him to talk it over with his supervisors and to give me a call when he wanted me to come back to the office to sign stuff. By now I was cooled off from the air conditioning, so I went out to catch the bus. I hope he called later, because the number printed on that card is for phone sex."

Pa-flonk, pa-flonk. Ben gave a thumbs up and nodded his approval of Jack’s riff without breaking his slow, steady pace. Pa-flonk, pa-flonk, pa-flonk, pa-flonk. He listened closely to his feet, considered, but finally shook his head and exhaled a Nah. Pa-flonk would look corny on the page. He turned to the clock on the wall to his left, happy that it was big enough so he didn’t need to put on the glasses hanging on the cord around his neck. Happier that he had only three minutes left to make up his twenty. There was a digital count-down clock right in front of him on the exercise machine, but he didn’t like to count on it because it was accurate. You couldn’t cheat if it was accurate. You couldn’t stop forty seconds early pretending you didn’t remember where the second hand was when you started. Hell, you couldn’t even trick yourself into walking an extra minute if you were feeling strong. The clock on the wall was more accommodating. It didn’t command you. It worked with you. He’d spent too many years regulated by a university clock, by the minute hand clicking onto the ten before the hour that ended his lecture whether or not he’d reached the end. Too many years of that to be victimized now by some inflexible count-downer that was probably built in China anyway.

Ben kept trudging on, regular as a metronome. Jack stretched a small yawn and settled comfortably on his seat to browse the editorials. Ben was jealous that Jack didn’t need glasses, but as he studied his friend’s face, he thought, and not for the first time, that when the light washed across Jack’s face from the side and showed the cracks and deep crevasses in his nearly eighty-year old parchment-dry skin, that Jack looked a bit like Pruneface, that wonderful villain from the Dick Tracy comic strip that frightened Ben when he was a kid. Ben knew it’d be dangerous as hell to ever tell that thought to Jack, though. Jack probably thought of himself as he’d been in his forties, all smooth-shaved and well-coifed. Ben didn’t dare imagine Jack’s scathing riposte that would drop Ben to his metaphoric knees before the two old friends would whoop in mutual appreciation and fall about together in forgiving laughter.

Ben rolled his shoulders a couple of times to relax them. He didn’t want to rush his shopping this afternoon. Kay had told him she had other errands after she finished at the beauty parlor, so not to expect her home until dinner time. He’d always loved her hair, and doubly when she came home with it lustrous from her weekly appointment and framing her oval English face to advantage. She’d had long, straight, golden hair even before he’d met her, hair that flowed down to her waist and that turned into spun sugar in the sunlight. It had darkened into honey many years ago, but even now, streaked with silver, it still brought oooohs and aaaahs from strangers when she rode down the sidewalk on her scooter. He’d helped her into her rig before he’d changed into his exercise togs to do his dailies. He’d checked that the battery was charged, and kissed her out the door of their apartment.

I’ll pick up a new Trigger for you, she’d called as she scooted down the hall toward the elevators. It looks like you’ve nearly filled up the pages of the one I gave you for Father’s Day. Take Trigger with you if you and Jack go out for coffee. You never know when you’ll want to write down an idea.

Ben pa-flonked along in silence, letting his mind glide slowly into a middle-distance memory, letting his eyes blur their focus as the steady rhythm eased him into a drowsy reverie where he didn’t hear himself humming the nostalgic melody Kay loved so much.

Hum-hum, hum-hum, hum Paris,

Hum-hum, hum-hum, and gay,

I heard the laughter hum dum-dum,

Dah dah-dah street café.

The melody was lilting, and Ben drifted far away as the strings swelled.

Da-dee, da-dah da dee-dum

Dum-dee, dum-dum, dum-dee . . .

I found one for later, Jack broke the spell by smacking his knuckles on the editorial he’d been reading. Buried at the bottom of the op-ed page, but all the more better for their trying to hide it.

Well, that’s welcome, Ben replied, because everything on the TV is boring. He blinked himself back to the present. Can’t you find something else? He pantomimed clicking the remote. The talkers were more fun back during the primaries.

Oh, yes? How so? Jack responded, always ready for one of Ben’s pungent analyses of human behavior. Ben explained over the pa-flonks that he’d loved watching the faces of the residents who came to the exercise room and found the TV already turned on. First thing, without even looking at what was playing, they’d hunt for the remote control. He said he watched them prowl the room with their hands grasping the air in front of them, feeling for the remote they needed to touch like a Greek needs to touch his worry beads. He hadn’t cared himself what was on the TV, Ben said, because he took out his hearing aids when he worked out alone, so he was pretty well insulated from the rants and seductions of the talking heads, but that each newbie who came to work out had had a disturbingly manic need to control the program. Man or woman, it was the same. They needed to control the control, he quipped.

What had tickled Ben most during that 2008 primary season, and he glanced over to make sure Jack was listening, was how their channel selections revealed their politics. When someone captured the remote, they’d only then check to see what was on the screen. If it was MSNBC, they’d twitch a sort of nervous tick, revealing they were Republicans by clicking over to Fox News. They only felt safe to start their regimen in sync with the affirming platitudes of Bill O’Reilly, Ben supposed.

Jack nodded encouragement with an occasional uh hunh, and Ben said he hadn’t been surprised by that behavior because, after all, he knew he lived in a high-end building deep in the heart of Zion (proud to be the reddest of the red states) so he had assumed the residents were the kind of Republicans that thought McCain was too easy on illegals and that Palin had great legs. Ben allowed that he had understood they needed assurances for what they tried to convince themselves they believed while they pumped their iron, but he confessed he’d gotten a bigger kick out of the stray Lefty that came into the room, like the Asian woman of uncertain age who never spoke but whose eyes had smiled when the CNN crawl showed Obama’s ratings soaring in California. Or the dark-complexioned yuppie (did people still say yuppie, Ben wondered?) who had claimed he was Persian and said his parents had brought him to the States when he was a kid just weeks before the 1979 Revolution, but that the residents still eyed him warily, as if he were an embedded terrorist from deep in the heart of ISIS. But the best of that campaign season’s crop of exercisers, Ben said, had been the muscle-toned couple that the regulars called the renters. They were in their late twenties and wore Sierra Club T-shirts when they worked out, and their regimen involved alternating rhythmic sit-ups while they faced each other, legs locked together at the knees, that had embarrassed the regulars because it looked like the gymnastic sex that the oldsters pretended they didn’t watch on late night TV.

When any Lefties saw Fox News on the screen, they’d grind their teeth as they scoured the room for the remote. Their tension pulled their shoulders up around their ears, and they didn’t relax them back down until they’d switched to MSNBC. Jack described them gleefully as the Intolerant Liberals. Ben was more charitable and called them The Garrison Keillor Brigade.

Since Obama’s inauguration last January, all the fun is gone, said Ben. "During the general election things got so vulgar I couldn’t listen to anyone, and the best I could hope for is that the batteries in the remote would die or that nobody turned on the Cooking Channel. You want to know how to lose your appetite? Listen to those unctuous bastards natter on about making the perfect crème brulée."

Jack turned the page of the Tribune. By habit, he folded it into quarters the tall way, the way he learned when he was a strap-hangar commuting to the Loop on the El from Evanston. The residents had gotten intrigued watching him one day and had asked him to demonstrate how he folded it. Suddenly, Jack had been the center of attention, and Ben had watched him preen. Jack kept them so rapt with his performance that they didn’t feel time pause as he carefully folded one page after the other, top to bottom, neatly creasing each fold between his back-turned knuckles so his thumb pad wouldn’t get inky. Then, with all the pages folded, he flipped the first one to show his audience how it’s like a double-jointed elbow when you’ve finished reading the fourth half-page and you turn it behind the whole sheaf to start reading the left half of the next broadsheet. He described each step of the process with a detailed commentary that would have impressed a Cuisinart demonstrator at Macy’s. He’d stood up and acted it out, complete with pantomiming the swaying train and how you hold the top of the paper by hooking your wrist through the strap and your left hand hangs lose above your head. To Ben’s amazement, Jack had gotten a round of applause. A very pale-skinned man whose thinning blond hair made him look older than he probably was, had raised his head slowly, stretching his disturbingly thin rooster neck as though he was preparing to crow, and asked in a startlingly high-pitched voice what kind of work Jack did. I’m retired, Jack smiled, but I used to be in destruction. Jack knew how to solicit a feed line with the expertise of a Letterman. There was a silence while brows furrowed and sideways glances consulted nervous eyes with the unspoken question, was he a criminal, a mobster, what they called on the television a hit man? The thin-necked counter-tenor served Jack the expected set-up, destruction? Yeah, I used to knock things down. Houses, churches, tall buildings at a single bound. I had a wrecking company. Whatever needed coming down, they called me. My nickname in the business was ‘Steel Balls’. Here, I’ll show you. He waved them over to the large window at the end of the gym. You see those cranes, those cement trucks, all that construction going up? Lovely hotels, right? Brand new office buildings? Well, he clapped his hands so their eyes turned back to him, whatever gets constructed up, one day it needs to get destructed back down again. That’s what I did. He clapped again, Destruction.

After that day, oh, it had been a few years ago, Jack was a celebrity in the building. The good folks couldn’t speak his nickname, too embarrassing, but they were titillated as all get out by it, so they took to saying his initials, S. B. But only when he wasn’t there. When he was there, Ben noticed, it was mostly Mr. Abelman, or when one of them was feeling especially jocular, Jack. But last Pioneer Day, Ben had been on the roof terrace watching the fireworks at dusk, and he’d heard a moon-faced patriarch warn a tot who was manic from too much green Jell-O that she’d better settle down or "S.B.’ll get you, and you know what he does, Destruction!"

Ben glanced at the clock while Jack turned the page. Another two minutes to go. His shoulders were starting to ache, so he rolled them. Forward, then backwards. Back and forth a couple of times. Funny, he thought, it ought to be the legs that get tired, but it’s always the shoulders. I must not stand up straight. Dr. Keller had told him that walking would reduce the tension, but who believes a doctor? He remembered the old joke. The doctor tells his patient she has only six months to live, but after six months go by and she still owes him a lot of his fee, he tells her she can live six months longer.

Anything good in today’s paper? Ben asked.

Jack wagged his head gently back and forth, clucking in amazement, and chirped, I found a really good one today. He smacked the op-ed again. I’ll save it till you get outta the shower. Hip, hip, hypocrisy! This may be the best one this week, but it’ll wait.

The room settled, and they were quiet except for the rhythmic sound of the pa-flonks and the droning of the TV voice in the background. Jack cackled quietly, reading, still seated comfortably on his bicycle seat, waiting for Ben to finish. Ben let himself slip back into a memory. Pa-flonk, pa-flonk, pa-flonk.

Suddenly Jack shouted out. Oh, no! No! NO, GODDAMMIT! jumping up, pointing angrily to the TV screen. Do you see what they’re showing?

What? What? What? Ben shouted back, startled out of his reminiscence of Leslie heading off to her first day at school.

The bastards destroyed the statue of Athena. Over in the goddamned Middle East, a beautiful Greek statue that’s been there forever, and this yo-yo announcer is talking about . . . what? . . . The number of people killed in Syria? I don’t give a damn about the people killed in Syria. Why is he telling me about dead people, Ben? That’s not what pisses me off. It’s what they did to Athena. Jack wadded up his cardigan and threw it at the TV, but it billowed and fell ten feet short. Let them all kill each other. They’re good at that. There were millions of dead people in that desert before them and there’ll be millions more when this latest crowd of crazies is long gone, and we’re all gonna kick it one day, probably sooner than we know, so dead people don’t mean more to me than a stifled sneeze in the chronic chest cold of history, right? He plopped back down on the stationary bike but he was just revving up. "And pardon my aging ass for saying it, but I don’t give a damn if the Sunnis kill the Shi’ites, or the Shitskies kill the Sufis, or the Loonies kill the Toonies. It’s all a lotta rocks over there anyway. I’ve been there and I’ve seen ‘em, so to hell with them. No, what really pisses me off is what they did to the Palmyra Athena. She was there for hundreds of years before there was even a Mohammed, for Christ’s sake, and they went and broke her head off? And her arm, for Christ’s sake? And why? Why is because they can’t read their damned Koran any better than our Christian crazies can read their damned Bible, and they think there’s not supposed to be any images of man, any likenesses of God, and so they smash up a beautiful woman who’s a goddess and who’s one of the few proofs that mankind has created something worthy, that we’re worth something as a species, so maybe we shouldn’t blow ourselves off the earth like the dinosaurs, and I mean ars is longa and vita is brevis and it makes me rage against the dying so much I wanna torture ‘em, Ben, you’re damned right I do, for what they did to that beautiful statue. Forget water boarding, Ben, I wanna lock ’em in a room that’s got likenesses of fucking Mohammed pasted on the walls and floor and ceiling, hundreds of him, thousands of his eyes staring at them for the rest of their unbathed lives." Jack took a gulp of breath. Deep. Held it.

Ben smiled, and Jack exhaled slowly, lowering his shoulders and raising his eyebrows as though he were waiting for an answer to a question only he had heard asked.

Ben glowed in the warmth of Jack’s rant. He’d always basked in them, and he hoped to hear one every day. Jack in full flight of logorrhea was as beautiful a form to Ben as Athena was to Jack. Ben had never lost his admiration for how quickly Jack would erupt and just as quickly subside, happily quiet at his tirade’s ending as if he’d not spoken at all. Ben smiled back at Jack and just kept pa-flonking along, beating out a steadying rhythm that settled the room.

What’s the old-clock-on-the-wall say? Jack asked, as casually as if he had not just frightened the air, as though he had just awakened from a blissful nap.

It says I can stop anytime I want, so I will, Ben replied, hitting the big red STOP button and slowing his stride as the treadmill coasted to a stop. He stepped off, keeping a firm hold on the handlebar grip. Yesterday he’d felt lightheaded from the exertion and nearly fallen when he stepped down, so he remembered to be cautious.

They knew the drill. Jack tossed Ben his towel, lifted his cardigan off the floor with his cane, and they headed towards the door for the long hallway to the elevators. Jack led the way as Ben dawdled a step or two behind, rubbing his hair with the towel. He liked that Jack’s cane made no sound on the newly re-carpeted floor, and he’d always liked the stinging scent of fresh carpets. It smells of chemical preservatives, he thought. It’ll wear off in a few days, he told himself.

Jack looked over his shoulder but decided to ignore Ben’s humming.

Hum-hum, hum-hum, hum hum-hum,

My heart was young and gay,

I heard her laughter hum dum-dum,

And I’m feelin’ OK.

The lyrics stayed inside his head, but Ben realized he was humming. He smiled at the memory of Kay drawing a caricature of him in the café across from the Cluny Museum. He’d been writing all day, and it was the blue hour. It was very long ago, Ben reflected, and the novel hadn’t worked out.

No matter how they change her.

I’ll remember her that way.

One of the elevators was locked off—somebody was moving in or out of the building—so they waited, at peace.

I’m going to Dick’s, Ben said in the silence. His voice was quiet, earnest, instructive, forceful, and Jack’s eyebrows rose in curiosity. He understood the downward inflection of Ben’s declarative sentence, knew there was no debating Ben’s decision. He nodded slowly, twice, mostly to tell himself, OK, then, though he wondered what it was precisely that Ben would do there.

Neither said anything. As one elevator passed their floor on the way down, Jack nodded to himself again, accepting whatever was coming next, and folded his paper under his left arm in a swift and practiced move that never took his weight off his cane.

Another down elevator door opened, and who they called the-lady-with-the-dog came out. Ben and Jack nodded to each other as they stepped aside so she wouldn’t feel crowded. Once past them, she kept close to the wall, as always. She’d lived in the building as long as anyone could remember, and all the owners respected her eccentricity. She seemed frightened all the time, but nobody knew what she was frightened of, just like nobody knew her name. The thin whippet companion dog that was always with her was four-legged evidence that her doctor knew, and Ben was reminded of the cliché about dogs looking like their owners and vice-versa. The whippet’s rib cage showed through its sleek gray coat, and the woman was thinner than seemed healthy. She wore her graying hair close to her head, and since they both had lean pointy noses, the dog and the lady did seem to share a common gene pool.

Ben had remarked often how she leaned to one side as she walked, hugging the wall, sliding her shoulder along it, and it didn’t matter if the wall was on her right or left. In a way, she seemed to Ben to be less than real, a sort of ethereal shadow gliding along the wall. Have a pleasant day, Ben said softly as she sidled away, and then quietly to Jack, What’s good about this building is that we all keep an eye out for each other. I’ve never seen her in any serious trouble, not like the rock climber from the seventeenth who seems to have his foot in a cast every other month, but if she were, I know somebody’d help her. Or me, if I needed it.

She ever answer you?

I don’t think so, but I figure a friendly voice is always welcome, Ben answered. She’s so alone. Maybe I give her some cheer, who knows? Under his breath, he added to himself, We must love one another or die.

Auden. Yeah.

Ben turned his head slowly to his friend, For a destructor, you’re damned well read, you know that?

At last an elevator door opened. The green arrow pointed up, and Ben and Jack stepped in. Push it for me, Ben nodded towards the panel of buttons as he poked the towel into his ear, and Jack hit 23, lighting it up as the doors closed. They rode up in silence.

I wanna stop at Sam’s on the way? Jack’s rising inflection turned his statement into a question that he assumed Ben would understand. Ben nodded, and hummed to himself. He understood that Jack had invited himself to tag along.

Chapter 2:

Tuesday, October 13, 2009 – 2:50 PM

Kay? Jack called down the long hall. Is this for just anybody?

Get your nose out of my dinner, Ben called back. He had showered and changed into black jeans and a black long sleeved polo shirt, and he was looking in the bathroom mirror, tweaking his combover. You know she’s not here, who are you trying to fool?

How would I know she’s not here?

Because you wouldn’t dare open the refrigerator if you thought she were. Ben’s voice grew louder as he came down the hallway. Touch the cold roast beef, and Kay’ll cut off your tail with a carving knife. You can get a snack at Sam’s, Ben said as he opened the hall closet.

She’s at her . . . ?

At the hair dresser’s. That electric scooter’s a godsend. To both of us. Gives her more independence, gives me more time to do the deeds that dast be done.

Look at you, Jack pointed at Ben. Black on black, what are you, in your Johnny Cash period?

Ben flitted his eyelashes, I’m incognito today, on a mysterious mission. He slipped on a black windbreaker and pocketed his wallet, keys, and well-worn leather notebook, the tiny one with a tiny pencil in its sheath, like an old-fashioned address book. Kay called it Trigger, after Chekhov’s character Trigorin who carried one to jot down descriptions about interesting people he met, or if he had an idea for a short story. Ben had taken to doing the same, years ago.

Jack grabbed his shoulder bag, let the door slam locked behind them, and followed Ben down the hall to the elevators, shoving his water bottle into the elastic straps on the side of the bag. He dried his hand on the sleeve of his zip-up cardigan as they rode the elevator down.

They entered Sam’s Bookstore through the back door, just across the alley. I’m gonna browse the cheapies, Jack said as he went down the stairs to the basement. I’ll meet you up front for coffee.

Don’t take forever, Ben called after him, "I don’t want to be rushed at Dick’s. It’s an important purchase, and I need to get it right."

Sam’s wasn’t crowded, which always made Ben sad. There aren’t many great independent bookstores left in America, and Sam’s ranked right up there with the Tattered Cover in Denver and Powell’s in Portland. When he was in a Barnes & Noble, Ben sometimes forgot which city he was in. He’d walk out the front door and look up and down the street for familiar reference points. Sometimes he’d get turned around and make himself dizzy trying to figure out where he was. When he found himself in a parking lot, and that happened too damned often when he was traveling, he’d do a three-sixty back inside, find a chair to sit on, and admit to himself that he was in a fog. Sometimes he’d just shake his head in despair at the odor-free interior of the franchise, close his eyes, and stay seated till the dizziness stopped. Well, dizziness went with the territory, more and more, and he knew it. Something about blood pressure. Too high or too low, he made a point of not remembering which. But in Sam’s, Ben felt grounded. In Sam’s, the comforting smell of old paper told him he was in Sam’s. Ben loved the drab red carpeting with the muted pattern and the shining round wood dance floor from decades earlier when it hosted tea dances, and best of all (well, if not best, at least damned good) was the old Dumont television set in its wood cabinet. It hadn’t worked for years, but it was like the one his folks had in their living room, back when his dad sold them.

Most terrific of all was the staff that not only greeted you like family but actually had read books. They knew books. They carried books in their backpacks and read them on the bus. No rent-a-clerks here. Lordy-lord, these folks even liked books. Damn, he had to laugh in pain when he remembered looking for the drama section in a bleakly institutional bookstore in a Philadelphia suburb. He’d just flown in to visit his daughter, and he was trying to find a copy of Athol Fugard’s play, Sizwe Bansi is Dead, because he’d just graded what he dearly prayed would be his absolutely final batch of dreary short stories from his—dear God, let it be my final—class of ever-less interesting students, and he’d wanted to read one of Fugard’s long speeches out loud to remind himself what fine writing sounded like, but the shelves were all so corporately organized by some whiz kid at a computer in Bangalore that he’d gotten so weak-kneed and nauseated stooping and kneeling and standing and bending that he’d had to go down on all fours on the floor until his eyes stopped pulsing. He’d thought he was saved when a clerk came by pushing a trolley and re-shelving books that people had browsed at the tables in the cordoned off coffee shop section.

Young lady, Ben had called just a little bit more loudly than he needed, and the clerk had turned to him with a head cocked to the side as though she wasn’t certain if the man on the floor was dangerous. "First thing, will you