Now the light rail car was mostly empty. Brettigan counted only a dozen or so passengers, including the young man and woman still sitting across the aisle from him—the man who, the doctor had predicted, would soon ask him for money. In preparation for this request, Brettigan reached into his wallet and opened it, taking out a five-dollar bill, which he folded into his palm. The young man watched him do so without interest and then went back to straightening and fussing with his pile of pamphlets. As the train erupted from the tunnel into the sunlight, Brettigan waited to be asked for money, to be put to the test, to be saved by Notre seigneur en pauvre, but the young man had turned his head to observe the landscape of hotels and businesses passing by, and Brettigan, clutching his money, realized that he wouldn’t be tested today, nor would he be saved.
- 2 -
The Codgers Club, a group of retirees also known as “the Thundering Herd”—a schoolteacher, a pediatrician, a morose mechanic, and a man who seemed to have spent his life as a successful high-society drug dealer and who was now noted for his dapper outfits, impeccable manners, and straight talk—were all waiting for Brettigan near the Utopia Mall food court, in front of a shuttered Asian fast-food outlet, the peculiarly named Slow Boat to China. They had all been in high school together and through the years had remained semi-friends.
“Look who’s here,” the pediatrician said, wagging a fat finger in Brettigan’s direction. “You’re late.” The pediatrician, the oldest morbidly obese person Brettigan knew, was lovable and soft-spoken, although this morning his speech was interrupted by a coughing fit with broken chords of phlegmy notes scattered up and down the scale. “What,” he coughed, “happened to you?”
“I met someone,” Brettigan announced, smiling down at his assembled aging acquaintances. “I met someone on the light rail.” Chaz, the drug dealer, was drinking his usual herbal tea from a thermos and seemed preoccupied. He gazed in the direction of the Mountain Music store, which, because of the early hour, was also shuttered, all its guitars and banjos under lock and key.
“You met someone?” Celia, the schoolteacher, asked. She was a smoker, and her breath smelled like an ashtray. “So? Why’d that make you late? Did this person slow down the train?”
“This someone,” Ken, the mechanic, inquired gloomily, “was she beautiful?”
“Well, no,” Brettigan told them. “It was a doctor. He. He was a doctor. He said he was a doctor. I have his business card right here somewhere. This guy gave me a cure for everything and told me that a French-Canadian version of Jesus would give me a test this morning for my salvation.” Brettigan scratched a mosquito bite on his forehead. “But there was no test. Jesus didn’t show up.”
“Oh, that guy?” The drug dealer was suddenly alert and paying close attention. “The physiognomist? With the trilby hat and the glasses?” Brettigan nodded. “I know him,” the drug dealer said, without elaborating.
“He didn’t mention anything about physiognomy. His card said he was a psychoanalyst.”
The drug dealer shrugged. “No, it didn’t say that. Guy’s a four-flusher. He calls on Jesus, but guess what, Jesus ain’t coming. That’s all I know.” He took another swig of his herbal tea. “No Jesus today, no Jesus yesterday, no Jesus tomorrow. Jesus has left the building.” He smiled. “Did he want to give you a cure for old age? He does that. Fountain of Youth type thing. No such cure. I have news for him: old age is lethal. No one survives it.”
“Okay. Forget Jesus. Let’s get going,” the schoolteacher said, rising with some difficulty to her feet, supported by her cane whose ivory handle was carved in the shape of a cocker spaniel. “You guys. Who’s got the stopwatch?”
“We already talked about this,” the mechanic said, sounding impatient. His face was a succession of masks. He really had no face of his own. “We’re not using the damn stopwatch. This is not a race, for heaven’s sake. We are not competing. How many times do I have to say that? I refuse to be pressured. I told you all this only last week.”
“Well, it may not be a race, but don’t forget that the Hungry Dumpster is always gaining on us,” the drug dealer said, raising his finger in the air to make his point.
“Chaz, stop with the metaphors. I hate them,” the schoolteacher said. “All right. No stopwatch? Fine. But we agreed that we needed to pick up the pace, didn’t we? I thought we had agreed about that.”
“You agreed,” the mechanic said. “You agreed with yourself. You can break free from us any time you want.” He made another face, this one for exasperation. “I won’t mind.”
“We all seem rather irritable this morning,” Brettigan observed. “We need to exercise. Come on. Let’s go.”
* * *
—
As he walked, Brettigan contemplated his environment, as he always did. A dream palace owned by Canadians, the largest of its kind in the United States, the Utopia Mall had no windows to the outdoors and no visible clocks to note the time of day, producing in the visitor a disorienting spatial-temporal rupture. You didn’t know where you were or what time it was, and after a while you might forget why you had come there and who you were. The mall didn’t look like a shopping center so much as a casino that had somehow taken the form of a labyrinth. The mall had a center, but the Thundering Herd had disagreed about where it was located and what could be found there and whether trapped spirits resided at its core. Constructed in the early 1990s, the mall contained millions of square feet of retail space, and untold visitors annually. One of these visitors, his hands crossed over his chest in an X so that his right hand grasped his left shoulder and the left hand the right shoulder, a look of sheer mad terror on his face with Thorazine-associated tongue waggings, was now headed toward Brettigan, who stepped out of the man’s way just before the stranger tottered off in no particular direction.
“Look at that American. A wack job. Haven’t seen him before,” the drug dealer said, giving Brettigan a slight nudge in the ribs. “And believe me, I’ve seen most of them and done business with them.”
The Thundering Herd accelerated slightly as they made the turn past a bicycle store, once called Pedalphilia until protests from the community caused it to be renamed A Bicycle Built for You, and an audio outlet, Unbound Sound. Behind the gated window was a statue of a god, Prometheus, wearing headphones and chained to a rock. Next door was a seafood restaurant, The Prawnbroker. Brettigan felt a twinge in his knee. Would there ever be an end to the cutesy marketing names? No. Among other things, retail capitalism was all about disguises—Jack the Ripper wearing a clown mask. Most of the stores were still closed and would not open for another hour. This time of day, the light seemed to have been artificially sweetened, and from a distant source, music of no particular character or expressivity dribbled downward over everybody.