wall-sized portrait of a badly drawn burrito. How was this going to turn into anything but a ridiculous clusterfuck?
Enough, I said to myself. Just go. When you’re on your deathbed you’re gonna wish you could get back all the time you spent waiting for other people.
I started to stand but stopped myself halfway up. My stomach flinched, as if cattle-prodded. I felt another dizzy spell coming on.
I fell hard back into the booth. More side effects. I was already light-headed, my body trembling from shoes to shoulders in random spells, like I swallowed a vibrator. It’s always like this when I’m on the sauce. I dosed six hours ago.
I took slow, deep breaths, trying to cycle down, to level off, to chill out. I turned to watch a little Asian waitress deliver a plate of chicken fried rice to a bearded guy on the other side of the room.
I squinted. In half a second I counted 5,829 grains of rice on her plate. The rice was grown in Arkansas. The guy who ran the harvester was nicknamed “Cooter.”
I’m not a genius, as my dad and all my old teachers at Undisclosed Eastern High School will inform you with even the slightest provocation. I’m not psychic, either. Just side effects, that’s all.
The shakes again. A quick, fluttery wave, like the adrenaline rush you get when you lean your chair too far past the tipping point. Might as well wait it out, I guess. I was still waiting on my “Flaming Shrimp Reunion,” a dish I ordered just to see what it looked like. I wasn’t hungry.
A flatware set was wrapped in a napkin on the table in front of me. A few inches away was my glass of iced tea; a few inches from that was another object, one I didn’t feel like thinking about right then. I unwrapped my utensils. I closed my eyes and touched the fork, immediately knew it was manufactured in Pennsylvania six years ago, on a Thursday, and that a guy had once used it to scrape a piece of dog shit from his shoe.
You’ve just gotta make it through a couple of days of this, said my own voice again from inside my skull. You’ll open your eyes tomorrow or the next day and everything will be okay again. Well, mostly okay. You’ll still be ugly and kind of stupid and you’ll occasionally see things that make you—
I did open my eyes, and jerked in shock. A man was sitting across from me in the booth. I hadn’t heard or felt or smelled him when he slid into the seat. Was this the reporter I spoke to on the phone?
Or a ninja?
“Hey,” I mumbled. “Are you Arnie?”
“Yeah. Did you doze off there?” He shook my hand.
“Uh, no. I was just tryin’ to rub somethin’ off the back of my eyelid. I’m David Wong. Good to meet ya.”
“Sorry I’m late.”
Arnie Blondestone looked just like I imagined him. He was older, uneven haircut and a bad mustache, a wide face made for a cigar. He wore a gray suit that looked older than I was, a tie with a fat Windsor knot.
He had told me he was a reporter for a national magazine and wanted to do a feature on me and my friend John. It wasn’t the first request like this, but it was the first one I had agreed to. I looked the guy up on the Web, found out he did quirky little human-interest bits, Charles Kuralt stuff. One article about a guy who obsessively collects old lightbulbs and paints landscapes on them, another about a lady with six hundred cats, that sort of thing. It’s what polite people have instead of freak shows I guess, stories we can laugh at around the coffee machines in the office break room.
Arnie’s gaze stayed on my face a little too long, taking in my beads of cold sweat, my pale skin, the thatch of overgrown hair. Instead of pointing out any of that, Arnie said, “You don’t look Asian, Mr. Wong.”
“I’m not. I was born in [Undisclosed]. I had the name changed. Thought it would make me harder to find.”
Arnie gave me the first of what I assumed would be many, many skeptical looks. “How so?”
I half closed my eyes, my mind flooding with images