End Vision, page 19
“Are you fucking kidding me?” said Shelly.
Cara grinned.
Shelly approached the vehicle with her hands atop her head. The car looked very expensive, like a Russian instagram model. “This is your car?”
“This is my car.” Cara laughed. “I just got it. Do you like it?”
“It’s unbelievable.”
“You don’t think it’s too much?”
“Absolutely not. It’s beautiful, Cara.”
The Mercedes made Shelly look at Cara in a different light. She had always known the woman made a lot more money than she did. She had to. Cara was second in command to Robert at the VerMas Media Group. But Shelly had never fully understood the gap between their lives until this moment. It was now clear how Cara could be so bold and demanding of celebrities (washed up or not) that still honestly made Shelly a little star-struck. Cara basically owned them. Along with Robert, Cara was in control of their careers. She was the gatekeeper. All of these realizations fell on Shelly like connecting pieces to a large puzzle.
“Would you like to drive?” asked Cara.
“What?! No...Cara, I couldn’t.”
“Here.” Cara tossed the Mercedes keys to Shelly. “I don’t feel like driving.”
Shelly stood, shocked and giddy. Her smile so large it hurt her face. “This is unbelievable.”
She climbed into the driver seat. Cara sat at her side.
“Where are we going?” asked Shelly.
“The gallery is in Oxnard, up toward Ventura.”
Shelly placed the key in the ignition and turned it. The engine roared. The car felt tight around her, like being gripped by something powerful.
Cara smiled at her as Shelly carefully backed the Mercedes from the space.
“But if we are going all the way to Oxnard,” said Cara, “you’re going to have to step on it. I’ve got an appointment this evening at six.”
Shelly had the car pointed toward the garage’s exit. She looked at Cara, unsure.
“Well,” Cara said, “Get on it!”
Shelly revved the engine, put the Maybach in gear, and tore out of the garage into the ever-present, always smiling, L.A. sun.
The Trouble with Memory
United flight 4923 shuddered on its descent through the dark clouds over the central Colorado plains. The plane had topped the Rockies and turned back to the west. The flight’s captain had already been on the intercom to warn of the slight turbulence the plane would encounter during its approach to Denver International, and the flight attendant had followed him with a request to put all tray tables forward and return seat backs to a forward and upright position.
Short, rapid, elevator-drop movements of the plane through the turbulence caused momentary sensations of weightlessness in the cabin. When Andrew opened his eyes, he felt suspended in a state of dread, like he had awoken in the middle of some plunge into a bottomless void. The cabin’s space felt uneasy, and the passengers had assumed the upright, taut, alarmed position people on turbulent flights often take just before hysteria erupts from the religious and Godless alike in lamentations bargaining with the Lord. He blinked in confusion. The weight of his seat pushed hard into his bottom as the plane leveled out from a large drop. A muffled exclamation came forward from the back of the plane. A thin plastic window shade covered the small window at his side. Patrick sat in the middle seat to his right and was looking at Andrew with a mix of anxiety and annoyance.
Patrick’s presence put the pieces in place. They were flying to Amarillo. Andrew slid the shade open and looked out into the rushing fog of cloud. He felt the coolness of the high altitude winter sky radiating from the double-paned plastic glass.
“Where are we?” asked Andrew.
“Descending into Denver,” answered Patrick
“How long did I sleep?”
“Sleep?” Patrick pushed a sarcastic burst of air from his nostrils.
“How long have I been out?”
“Technically since at least yesterday, but you finally calmed down and passed out maybe ten minutes after take off.”
Andrew surveyed himself. He was in clothes that were not his own. They were clean, though, thankfully. He fought to remember how he’d gotten to the airport, about the events of the past few days, but he remembered little. He could evoke only small snippets of memory, like flipping through a childhood picture album. He saw himself at the Silver Turtle. On a train? On a bicycle? He specifically remembered being at work. He had talked to Cara...tThe police? A great terror flipped in his stomach.
“Are these your clothes?”
Patrick looked offended as he sipped from a bottle of in-flight water. He wore a white Aston Poplin dress shirt from Ralph Lauren and a turquoise tie under a tight-fitting dark navy cashmere sweater from H&M. Colorful, geometrically patterned dress socks paired with perfectly-pleated grey slim-fit chinos peaked out at his ankles above stylish urban sneakers from Baldese. He smelled strongly of aftershave and scented lotion.
Andrew wore brand new Wrangler jeans, still creased by factory folds, and a collared shirt covered by a black fleece jacket.“Yah. Okay. Whose clothes am I wearing?”
“Ramon’s.”
Andrew thought about that. The clothes didn’t look like they belonged to Ramon, but that made sense. Why let someone take off with clothes that you liked?
“Did you come get me?” asked Andrew. “I’m having some trouble piecing everything together here.”
Patrick looked over and grinned condescendingly. The plane began to shake. Two flight attendants inched down the aisle and collected drinks and garbage. In its descent, the plane sounded like a tea kettle. A monotoned matter-of-fact voice told the flight attendants to take their seats and buckle up. Then, suddenly, the plane dropped. A baby cried out. The plane shook harder. Andrew and Patrick locked eyes and held tight to the arm rests. The plane took an even greater drop. Andrew watched as a flight attendant three rows up hit the ceiling of the fuselage and landed with a crash atop the beverage cart. Cries and screams filled the cabin. An elderly woman seated next to Patrick on the aisle placed her blue-veined hand atop his and began to pray loudly.
“Jesus Christ!” Patrick exclaimed.
“Yes!” the woman proclaimed. “Christ be our shepard! Christ be with us!”
The plane’s tremors began to subside as the aircraft broke free of the low-hanging clouds. Outside Andrew’s window, the Denver airport, in profile, gave the illusion of snow-capped peaks. As the flight smoothed-out, the flight attendant rose slowly. Soda dripped from her body. Nobody rose to help her as she attempted to right herself and brush the impact off her body in proud, anxious swipes of her hands.
Patrick removed his own hand from the elderly woman’s. The plane continued its descent. Low, muffled speech filled the cabin.
Patrick took a sip from his water, his face scrunched in furrowed disgust. “I’m never drinking subpar water again,” he said. “If this would have been the last thing I had in life, well,” his eyes grew large, “I would have just died.”
Andrew smiled. He liked Patrick. Patrick was subversively funny, and even though he gave very opinionated advise (whether or not asked for), he was non-judgmental and was of the mindset that people were who they were, and there was little another person could do to change someone. He depended on this belief when scouting locations for the drama-filled television shows he helped create. Drama fueled him. Patrick was at his best when shit hit the fan. In times of great frenzy and buzz he operated like a great general at war — boldly and confidently. He studied reality television like a West Point cadet studied old battles, and thus could ignite and move scenes of drama through the locations he chose like Sherman marching toward the sea.
The aircraft touched down shortly after the turbulence. After a quick taxi, it powered down at a Concourse B jetway. Passengers gave one another little side glances and sly, relieved smiles as they stood, hunched at attention, packed together in the aisle as they waited to pull overstuffed carry-ons from overhead compartments packed as tight as Egyptian stone. Andrew heard the cabin door unlatch at the plane’s front, and the column of passengers began to deplane, one by one, moving toward the exit in single file. He followed Patrick down the aisle, nodded and thanked the poor, injured, pop-drenched flight attendant, then stepped into the mid-day commotion of Concourse B.
Once he and Patrick had cleared the gate, they stopped to study the flight boards hanging solidly across from movable walkways.
“What’s our gate?” Andrew asked.
“B-95,” replied Patrick.
“That is all the way down at the tip of the concourse.”
“Are you hungry?”
“Not especially, but I should probably try to eat something.”
“We have four hours until our connection to Amarillo. I am going to need to eat,” said Patrick. “Do you know anything good here to eat? I don’t want to eat shit.”
“Lets just walk down to the hub. All the good stuff is always there.”
They stood on the moveable walkway and proceeded toward the hub of the concourse, slowly passing gates with small black signs advertising places such as Rapid City, Bozeman, Rochester, Fargo, Albuquerque, and Spokane. In front of each gate, people gathered in similar fashion, sitting alone or with a group, most of them glued to phone screens, waiting for their connection to some city between the two great coasts.
At the center core of the concourse, Andrew studied their options: Catina Grill, Caribou Coffee, and Chick-fil-A; the mandatory Connections outlet offering newspapers, paperback books and magazines, gifts, souvenirs, luggage and handbags, and a variety of travel-related sundries and snacks; a shop that sold beef jerky and nothing but beef jerky from all types of hooved animals from around the globe called The Jerk Store; a wine bar called Pour backlit in red so as to give the impression of not being in United Concourse B, but maybe, instead, in some sort of San Francisco underground speakeasy. They settled on Elway’s, a steakhouse with Colorado-themed appetizers and entrees, a lineup of thick hand-cut prime steaks, fresh fish, cold water crustaceans, and more.
A waitress seated them at a booth across from the bar. She distributed their menus and asked for drink orders. Patrick ordered the Ginger Apple Sparkler (Grey Goose Le Citron Vodka, Leopold Brothers’ Apple Liqueur, Gosling’s Ginger Beer, Fresh Green Apple Slices) for thirteen dollars, and Andrew got a Coors Original for seven. “When in Rome,” he told the waitress. They sat quietly for a moment, attempting to relax and decompress from the morning.
Patrick closed his eyes and rubbed his temples with his fingertips. “I have something for you,” he said. Opening his eyes, he met Andrew’s gaze, then Patrick slid Andrew’s phone across the table.
“Heeeeyyyyy,” Andrew said, as if running into a person at a grocery store he thought he would never see again. “Where did you find my phone?”
“There is a funny story behind that...Are you ready?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure? You might want to wait for your drink. Let’s wait for our drinks. This is a story that really needs to be told over drink to do it justice.”
“Patrick...Come on, man.”
Patrick stretched the moment out for maximum drama and flair. “So, yesterday, after you made that most daring escape...Do you even remember that?”
“The trouble with my memory is…”
“Oh, it doesn’t matter,” Patrick said, waving away the question. “What matters is that your escape, maybe, wasn’t as successful as you thought it to be.”
“What do you mean?”
The waitress returned with the drinks and asked if she could take a food order.
“We need a second,” Andrew said to her. Returning his attention to Patrick, he asked,“What do you mean, Pat?” Patrick hated it when people shortened his name to Pat. Andrew knew this, and used the abbreviated name as a counterpunch to Patrick’s toying with him.
“I mean,” Patrick said, pausing to sip from his ginger apple sparkler, “that a good portion of the office saw your daring escape. It was quite the topic of conversation after you left.”
Andrew thought about this. From what he could remember, he had been stealthy. He had stayed low and quiet. He did remember, however, putting his finger to his mouth and silently shushing a young woman in a cubicle across from the front door. It now occurred to him he would have had to pass at least ten other cubicles along the way. Then it hit him. Shelly. He had been trying to avoid Shelly. He had not wanted to look bad and pathetic in front of her. And she had been in the room. The people who saw him acting like a crazed, dirty, military bum would have undoubtedly asked her what in God’s name was going on with him.
“Shelly?”
“Shelly,” confirmed Patrick, grinning from ear-to-ear.
“Fucking. Shit. What happened?”
“So the minute you are out of the office, right...like the second you are out the door...Sarah from sales is like, ‘Why the hell is Andrew Munden shushing me and crawling out the door?’ ” Patrick paused, as if allowing Andrew the opportunity to answer the question. “And, so,” he continued, “word gets around to Shelly about how you had been seen disheveled and hunched over, sneaking out of the office with a brown paper bag. She is concerned and must have tried to call you, because while I was at my desk, I heard your phone ringing across from your space.” Andrew remained silent. “So, of course, I went over and picked up your phone and saw that it was Shelly calling.”
“You didn’t answer it, did you?”
“Well, I didn’t answer it, but Shelly saw me standing at your cubicle with a ringing cell phone in my hand.”
The waitress returned. Andrew had barely touched his beer, but both he and Patrick ordered another round.
Andrew thought about how he must look to Shelly and took a long pull from his glass. He looked at his phone. It had powered down. Dead. He wondered what sort of messages it held inside.
Patrick opened his menu and studied it. Andrew followed suit. He had no appetite, but couldn’t remember the last time he had ingested solid food.
“You can always tell when a place is good when their specialty is everything,” said Patrick, breaking the silence. He fidgeted with the menu. “Look at how large this thing is.It must be over an inch thick.”
“Does it contradict itself? It is large. It contains multitudes,” replied Andrew.
Patrick smiled. “I’m looking through this travesty, and all I can think about is that I could have died on that plane. I was thinking it. ‘What if this is it? What if this is how I die…Plane crash.’ It was a short thought, but I thought it.”
“Yah. That woman next to you I think was thinking the same thing.” Andrew pressed his hands to his chest as if in prayer. “ ‘Almighty God, don’t let me go down sitting next to this flamer?’”
“A well-dressed flamer, though.” Patrick raised a brow. “And it would be good for a woman like that to go down on something once in her life.”
“You know, I bet that feeling...the feeling you get deep in your gut when those thoughts run through your head...don’t you think that’s worse than the actual thing? Like getting punched. Knowing you’re about to be punched is way worse than the actual punch. If the plane would have just kept going down toward the ground...what sort of thoughts would have run through your head? When you knew it wasn’t going to stabilize, that everything wasn’t going to be okay like all the other times? You think about how bad it will hurt, or when the strike will come. But it’s just a punch. You know the pain and discomfort associated with a punch. You know what a punch means in the larger scheme of things. But you don’t know, really, what being in a plane crash means.”
“I know right after I wanted something delicious. Not a Smash Burger. Not tater-tots off the pre-game menu. Did you see the shrimp cocktail? What is a huddle of shrimp?”
“Do you know what I mean, though?”
“I think, honestly...I think you are having a crisis, Andrew. I think you need to relax a bit.”
The waitress returned with the drinks. They ordered food. Andrew fidgeted with his phone. Outside Elway’s, the terminal was abuzz. Andrew watched the travelers. He wondered why airports always seemed so stressful. A thought crossed his mind — maybe the stress of the airport made even the worst of vacations seem like heaven. Airports were the culmination of a stress factor that rose to a point that made the vacation seem an orgasmic relief to the traveler.
He stared out at the terminal. Everyone seemed in varying states of distress, looking back-and-forth from tickets to gate numbers, then running at absolute full blast for the first time since high school across movable walkways, running with knees up and bags in hand, out of breath, blood pressure 210/140, to a gate then a plane then a beach chair that was probably occupied at that very moment by another person who had completed the exact same sprint only days before but was now drinking a pina colada out of a coconut machete-cut by a tanned local named Christo or Carlos or Ricardo, sipping contently under the hot Caribbean sun and finishing with lip smacking sips that ended in satisfied aaahhhhs. Soon, they would return home relaxed, well-fucked, back to a job and a life that absolutely required the planning of the next vacation.
Andrew drank his drink and thought himself ahead of the curve. Then he looked down at his phone. “What do you think will be on here?”
“I don’t know, Andrew. I will tell you, though, that whatever is on there...whatever she said, I’d listen to it. I’d look at it and think hard before I responded. You know what I mean?”
Andrew nodded.
“Shelly loves you. She was worried about you. She tried not to show it, but it was all over her face.”
“What did she say?”
“It’s not what she said. It’s how she looked. It’s what her eyes said.”
“What did she say, though?”
“She wanted the phone. She wanted to know where you were and what you had been doing. She said you hadn’t even been by to collect your clothes. She didn’t know where you had been staying. That she had called Ramon. That he hadn’t heard from you since the day of the incident at the meeting.”
