You Don't Love This Man (36 page)

“Five dollars to get in, one dollar per token, and each cup of beer costs two or three tokens, depending on the brewer,” she announced.

Miranda looked at me. I shook my head, but that seemed to be the very response she wanted. “Two, please,” she said firmly, pulling a twenty from her pocket. “And ten tokens.” She handed the woman the bill, and the woman passed Miranda ten wooden nickels before stamping the backs of our hands. The stamp's image of a Tolkienesque sorcerer in a robe and pointed hat softened before my eyes as the ink bled into the reticulations of my skin.

“Can he leave his jacket here?” Miranda asked, pointing toward a cardboard box behind the woman that held an assortment of shirts, hats, and glasses.

“We don't have a coat check,” the woman said. “That's the lost and found.”

Miranda nodded, but when we stepped past the woman and into the festival, she circled behind me and tugged at the collar of my jacket until I obliged by slipping out of it. “The tie, too,” she said, and I obediently removed it, then watched her stuff it into the jacket's inside pocket. While the woman manning the entry was engaged with the next customer, Miranda dropped my coat into the cardboard box. “No one's going to take it,” she said, patting
me on the back. She examined her palm with amazement. “You're soaked.”

Of course I was. It was a hundred degrees, and I'd been wearing a suit and tie while she led me through city streets at a rapid clip. I could feel my shirt stuck to my skin all across and down my back. “I didn't dress to attend Brewfest,” I said.

“Well,” she said. “Roll up your sleeves.”

I followed her order, but also furrowed my brow. “Five minutes, Miranda,” I said sternly.

She laughed. We moved forward.

I was struck first by the tumult of voices and squeals and laughter, the sputtered hiss of valves dispensing beer, music from various distances and directions, suffering various degrees of distortion, and beneath it all the steady rumble and shuffle of shoes against pavement. By that hour, many of the tables were askew, with staffers and patrons who could no longer hide what a day of heat and alcohol had done to them. Some festivalgoers appeared, like us, to have just arrived, and therefore still to possess some composure, but that population was vastly outnumbered by those at other points on the sobriety scale. An energized group of braying college boys were pushing or jumping into one another in a ragged, sunburned way, spilling beer and mock-threatening one another with an enthusiasm frayed enough that one sensed the jousting could slip into actual violence, should one of them say the wrong thing, with the wrong shove, to another. There were also those whose energy was completely sapped: they shuffled slowly, stood in place, or sat on the curb, holding cups of beer they probably didn't want to drink, but from which they drank nevertheless. When Miranda moved to one of the nearest tables, I heard an eruption of applause and laughter behind me, but turned to find only a small group
breaking up and moving off, and no evidence of what might have merited the cheer.

“This will make us feel better,” Miranda said when she returned. “It cost three tokens, so it must be good.” She handed me a bright red cup. I took a drink and discovered the beer to be surprisingly cold. I watched her take a modest little sip, but respond with a smile. “Isn't that good?” she said.

If she wasn't going to tell me, then what was there to talk about? I put my arm around her and pulled her next to me. “I wish we had more time,” I said.

“Me too,” she said.

We made our way farther along, toward a crowd of a dozen or so people gathered around a person who stood motionless before them, arms bent at the elbows and head canted at an odd, downward angle. The person was entirely covered—hat, sunglasses, face, and clothing—in metallic silver paint, and at first I took the angle of the performer's gaze to be the result of having entertained a child, until I remembered children weren't allowed in the festival. The man—if it was truly a man beneath that paint—ratcheted into motion then, twisting and raising his torso so that he was upright, then turning his head slowly in the direction of a young woman in shorts and a bikini top. She giggled nervously as the man raised his arms and brought his palms together and apart, miming applause. “Do you want a beer?” the woman asked loud enough for all of us to hear. When the robot responded with a slow, mechanized nod, she stepped forward and pressed her cup against his palm. His fingers curled with just enough force to make the cup buckle, a commitment to his role I noted with admiration. Then, through a series of agonizingly slow but transfixing movements, he lowered his neck, face forward, until his head extended from his
body in a posture unnatural to any human beyond the confines of a yoga class. He raised his arm, adjusted his wrist to level the cup, and moved his hand toward his face, all through movements that seemed the product of gears rather than muscles. When he leveled the cup a last time and then brought it slowly and in a straight line to his lips, I knew, even before it happened, what the result would be. He brought the cup to his lips, tilted the bottom up—and never opened his mouth. Beer spilled from his lips, cascading to the pavement and rolling in a sudsy ribbon toward the curb. When the cup was empty, the man tilted his head in confusion, raising the cup to the mirrored lenses of his sunglasses to peer, baffled, within. Then, with a sudden and shockingly authentic mechanical convulsion, he flung his arm away from himself, releasing the cup so that it flew into the crowd. We gasped and laughed and cheered, and I noted the hint of a smile upon the robot's silvered lips. Was it a part of the act, I wondered, or a break in character? I couldn't tell—and then it was gone. He began to rotate his torso slowly in our direction, but I didn't want to be the next person pulled into the act, so I led Miranda away. “You see,” she said. “This is fun.”

“I see,” I said.

“People should have fun. They should do what they want to do.”

What was she talking about? Herself? Me? Somebody nearby was bellowing into a loudspeaker about a special offer, or a soon-to-start event, or maybe something else entirely—amplified into distortion, the speech was indecipherable. “What do
you
want to do?” I asked.

“Just walk,” she said. “I just want to walk.”

We wandered further through the festival, and when she looked at me again, the leaves of a streetside maple cast fluttering shadows
across her face. A few more steps took us beyond those, though, and she raised her face to the sun, basking in the light as if it had only now appeared.

We came then to a long line of green bicycle racks filled with a chaos of frames, wheels, wires, and locks. A girl—she looked college-aged or recently graduated—stood there gripping the bar of the last bike rack to steady herself. Leaning forward, her eyes closed, she rested her head on her shoulder in an inebriated posture of either exhaustion or pain. There didn't appear to be anyone with her, and when Miranda asked if she was all right, the girl did not, at first, react. Then slowly, without managing to turn or acknowledge us, she shook her head. “Can I get you something?” Miranda said. “Some water? Or maybe someone who works here who can help you?” The girl could only shake her head silently, it seemed—when she tried to straighten and step from the bike rack, she wobbled, and we saw her tear-streaked cheeks and rolling, un-focused eyes. She closed them, seeking relief, but no sooner had she done so than she began to tilt dangerously backward. Miranda grabbed her quickly by the arm and helped her to the curb, where the two of them sat together, side by side.

I looked for a person of any authority in the area, but none was to be found. No one near the racks stood out as event staff, and neither did I see any police or security personnel. How a festival that centered on the consumption of alcohol could be almost entirely unsupervised was beyond me, but had there been a person in any official uniform there, I probably wouldn't have noticed the person I did, a man distinct at first only because he wore khaki chinos and, like me, a button-down dress shirt. He was walking toward a long row of green portable toilets that lined the opposite side of the street, and something about him struck me as familiar. I was
maybe forty feet away, and had only an instant in which to look before he stepped into the toilet and closed the door, but it was all I needed. I'm seeing things, I thought. That cannot be him.

I had somehow finished my beer, and its presence in my empty stomach worked a dizzying effect in my head. I was standing in the sun, but I had stopped sweating, and my damp shirt felt cold against my body. Miranda was on the curb, rubbing the upset girl's back and speaking quietly to her. The girl nodded in response, and then her lips curled into another sob. Miranda looked up at me. “I think we need to find someone for her,” she said.

The nearest tables were manned only by people pouring beer, and there was a line at each of them. Who was there to speak to? I looked back to the toilet the man had entered, but the door remained closed, so I stood there waiting. I wanted to see what he was going to do—and I suppose I wanted to see what I would do about it. When I turned back to Miranda, the girl had leaned away from her, head to the side. Quietly and with almost no movement, she vomited into the gutter. Miranda continued to rub her back and tell her it was okay, that she would feel better soon, while at the same time I turned to see the door I had been watching open again, and the man within stepped into the sunlight. The sleeves of his white dress shirt were rolled to above the elbow, and the shirt itself, in what I decided was an attempt to appear casual, remained untucked. The little pressureless faucets inside the portable toilets wouldn't have been much help cleaning purple ink from his hands, if that's what he'd had in mind, though it was also true that amid a crowd as tattooed, rubber-stamped, tanned, and sunburned as that one, probably no one would pay any attention to purple hands. The door of the toilet fell shut behind him with a hollow plastic thud as he hesitated, scanning his surroundings, and then walked in our di
rection. His hair was short and gray and his expression blank, save for his eyes, which looked as tired as they'd been in the photos I'd seen earlier in the day. When he reached the bike rack, he stopped no more than five feet from me. But his hands were clean.

Our eyes met, and he nodded. “How's it going?” he said politely. I hadn't heard Mooncalf's voice in twenty-five years—and even then, it hadn't been more than a couple sentences.

“Fine,” I said. “Yourself?”

“I don't know,” he said with a wry smile. “I may be finished for the day.”

Amazing—he'd had a few! His light-banter tone, the way he leaned against the bike rack: he was going for casual, but I could tell that he, too, was steadying himself. “There's only so long you can get away with it, out here in the heat,” I said. “A lot of people overdo it.”

He offered only the same genial, almost goofy smile, which included an involuntary widening of his eyes that made him appear slightly dazed. All these years, I thought, and I catch you in an off moment. Was this a celebration? Or was it a professional strategy, the proper prescription for leavening the nerves and adrenaline after the event? And was he so meticulous as to have planned it ahead, to know that a quick place to blend in while coming down would be among the raggedly drunk and freshly sunburned masses downtown?

“They think they can have one more,” I said. “And then it's even easier to say, Hell, why not another one? And before they know it, they're in a bad place.”

“That's why I'm shutting it down,” he said. “All these drunk kids are gonna be hurting in the morning.”

I tried, quickly, to imagine a timeline. He shoves the bag of cash
under his suit jacket, or maybe in the back of the waistband, and heads into the neighborhood, moving quickly between the empty buildings on his way to wherever his car is parked. He makes sure he hasn't been followed, then hops in, starts it up, and drives…home? Why not? The thing is over. The rest of his day is free.

But Amber gave him a dye pack. It would be explosive enough to blow the jacket right off his body, or explode the seams of his pants, if not to inject ink right into his skin. It would have soaked his entire back and legs, and probably injured him, as well.

This man next to me had a white shirt on. It was clean.

“What about you?” he said. “Are you done, too? Or are you just getting here?”

I believed it was him. The eyes, the hair, the voice—I believed it. And I thought, If you don't rob me twenty-five years ago, then Sandra doesn't see me as the wounded young man she can help. Even if Grant and Gina had still bothered to take me to Bristol's, I would have had no story to tell and no celebrity to trade on. So would any of my life have happened? Could I have been someone else? Someone other than the guy at the bank?

“Is there no one around?” It was Miranda's voice. She was still there, comforting the girl.

“I think it's last call,” I told the man next to me. “I don't think we have a choice.”

“That's good,” he said. “Because it's true—I was thinking about getting one more. I guess they're protecting us from ourselves, huh?” With that, he pushed himself from the bike rack and began to walk away. “You have a good evening, now,” he said, turning to look back at me one more time. And in that glance, and the tone of that last sentence, I thought I detected something. Had he recognized me?

Maybe I just wanted him to. Because he didn't alter his stride as he walked to the edge of the street, stepped onto a sidewalk next to a bordering fence, and made his way toward the nearest exit, half a block away. And I couldn't help it: I followed. Slowly, and from a distance, but still—I watched him walk toward the exit at what seemed to me a calculatedly normal pace, was close enough to see him move past the staff members still taking money from latecomers entering the festival as he slipped through the opening in the fence and continued on, past the stragglers milling outside. There were points at which people passed between us, but I caught sight of him again each time, and watched him walk at a brisk pace down the side street, away from the festival. A larger group of festivalgoers stepped in front of me at that point, and by the time they moved past—by the time I jogged around them, actually—he was most of the way down the block, passing quickly beneath storefront awnings. Parked cars blocked my view, but I thought I saw him—or part of him—once more. And then he was gone.