We Are Not in Pakistan (14 page)

What a scumbag.
Fletcher wants to taste his blood.

Martin answers Colette. “Quite a few wedding parties — that's why I'm not around much on weekends.”

“But Martin heard our Apocalypse Man before he left Sunday morning.” Colette is smiling, but Fletcher can feel her fighting the urge to hold her dinner knife somewhere near Tim's jugular. Make him pop the question now. No whereases, no notwithstandings.

He goes over and noses her leg, but it pushes him aside. She's describing the weekly doom and gloom visitation.

Fletch jumps up on the couch where he can see and hear better. Nobody orders him off.

Tim interrupts, “Wackos'll go on believing anything, even after Y2K arrived and nothing happened.” He assumes a good-ole-boy tone, as if he's from Texas. “End of the world — ha! I didn't worry about computers packing up, I worried about the Ayatollah types.”

Martin says, “It wasn't the end of their millennium.”

“Yeah,” said Tim, “but they knew it was ours. True believers, those Moslem fundamentalists. All so sure of themselves.”

He's looking real sure of himself, too. “Can't even get on the same calendar with the rest of the world.” Now he's stuffing himself — he can't resist Martin's cuisine.

Colette raises her glass to eye level and gazes at Tim through a ruby red lens.

Martin says to Tim, “Makes you wonder what we've been doing to cause so much hatred, doesn't it?”

“Oh, we haven't done anything they wouldn't do to the tenth power in our position,” says Tim, bristling. “If the ragheads were on top, you think they wouldn't blow up more than the World Trade Center? They think they're going straight to heaven when they blow themselves up. I say lock 'em all up and sterilize them.”

Tim expects Martin to nod in agreement — he thinks everyone agrees with him. Fletch never has, but no one pays him any attention.

“Lock who up?” says Martin, leaning forward. “All Arab-Americans?”

A tiny smile tugs at Colette's lips. She wants Martin to fight Tim, like Fletcher would fight for her or Yoriko.

“Nah, just the foreigners,” says Tim.

“That's how the Nazis began, with just the foreign Jews. Gradually, they turned fear to hatred.”

“I'm not afraid of anyone.” Tim is backtracking as if a swastika is rising in a thought balloon over his head. “But,” he says with passion beyond provocation, “anyone who can't speak English should be sent home.”

“You sound like you hate lots of people who are already at home, and a lot of other people in the world who aren't doing anything wrong, unless you count existing,” Martin says evenly. “Is there anyone you love?”

A question Tim probably has never been asked and to which Fletch knows Colette wants him to respond, Yeah, Colette. I love Colette. But he doesn't say anything.

Her expression says, It was on the tip of his tongue. He was willing to say it — he just can't get it out.

Fletcher doesn't think so.

“Sure — I love my family,” is what Tim finally blurts. “My mom, dad, sister.”

“And they love you?”

“Sure. Of course. They have to — they're family.”

“Don't think it works that way,” said Martin. “Sometimes you can hate what you've created. Especially if it turns out different from your expectations, from what you wanted. Fathers can hate their own children, sometimes. Mothers too.”

Fletch rests his head on his paws. So long as he gets fed, brushed, walked and petted, what does he care? He snoozes.

When he opens his eyes, Tim is still being his usual self. Martin is still objecting, but he looks as if his stir fry is decomposing in his mouth. Fletcher gives him a bark just to say, Tim's like the Apocalypse Man, blowing into his bullhorn. There's only a graffiti-splattered station wagon and a dried out Christmas tree to tell them apart.

But Martin doesn't understand Fletch. He leans back, and that look of desolation Fletcher saw the day of the apartment tour crosses his face. “Sometimes I think we humans deserve to be annihilated, like that Sunday morning preacher says, for what we do to one another for profit or love or religion.”

The scent of his anger mixes with frustration, pain beyond words. Fletcher goes over and rubs against his shins.

“I don't believe in any God who'd destroy his own creation,” Colette says.

Fletcher takes Tim's shoelaces in his front teeth; he pulls them loose. He steals back to his vantage point and tries to look innocent.

“But,” she continues, pert and bright, as if reading off a Trivial Pursuit card, “do you believe divine intervention is possible?”

Tim consults his Rolex, the Divine being a judge whose jurisdiction he acknowledges only on Sundays. “Don't need the Lord's intervention,” he says. “What we need is for government to get the hell out of business's way. Bush has the right ideas — a hundred and thirty-five trillion in tax relief.”

“For the rich, yes,” says Martin.

“For the small businessman, Roseman. People like you in the limo business.”

Fletch rolls his eyes and feels his ears droop. It's the usual liberal-conservative stalemate.

“It will take more than divine intervention.” Martin speaks with passion, as if talking about something he deems anything but trivial. “Things don't get better. You think, now we're in the twenty-first century, people will finally realize we're all equally human, despite our differences, and then along comes one more guy to remind you just how wrong you are.”

“Any wine left?” Colette interrupts the men's staring match. Tim reaches for the bottle. Colette holds her glass out to Martin, raising it slightly.

A homemade cherry pie is served — Fletch drools and whines. Nobody cares.

Veins stand out on Tim's forehead. Fletcher would bet he's calculating the income differential between himself and Martin. He can see Tim chewing on the idea that Colette might prefer Martin's lower net worth to his own.

Not the Colette Tim thought he knew so well — uh-uh.

Afterwards, Martin walks Colette and Tim out by way of the garage. A helium tank in the corner stands ready to puff up pink and powder blue balloons. Just Married signs in varying sizes rest against the wall, white tulle and ribbon sachets of rice stand on shelves. Ribbons of all widths stick their coloured tongues out at Tim for not thinking marriage. Fletch sticks his tongue out too because he's darn happy Tim is messing up. Whatever happens, Tim must never think he owns Colette, or Fletcher.

Colette smiles sweetly as she says goodbye to Tim but doesn't yell at Fletch for spraying pee on the hubcap of his Lexus. She takes Martin's arm to walk back to the house. Tim will notice that as he drives away. Well, at least subliminally.

Martin pulls his arm away at her front door. “You,” he says, “have been using me all evening.”

“Using you? Why would you think that?”

Martin looks down at Colette and Fletcher with a terrible bleakness on his face. “You've cooked up a cool scenario for Tim and all you want from me is silence, right? My complicity, right?”

Colette laughs uncertainly. “What are you talking about?”

She's so transparent.

“You want that man, that's your problem. You can have him. He's a piece of work. I didn't say anything tonight because you were my guest, he was my guest too. But from now on, just leave me out of it, okay? Don't need any more complications in my life.”

Colette opens her door a crack, lets Fletcher in and stands in the doorway.

“Okay,” she says. “Next time, I'll invite you, and you bring your partner.”

“Oh, sure! And you'll invite jealous Tim to be cured, right?”

She's see-through. Born in a glass factory.

“It won't work, unfortunately. E-mail from Nepal today — my partner says we should, um, separate. Things to work out, he says.”

For Colette, Nepal is just someplace without Jacuzzis or minibars, and Fletcher can tell she didn't think they had e-mail. As for the rest, she doesn't know how to react. “I'm sorry,” she says at last, in a neutral tone she uses with her girlfriends when they split with a guy. “Were you together long?”

“Twenty years. And I fought my loving parents two years before that, just to be with him.”

He was looking away.

“Tim and I were together seven years,” says Colette, as if searching for a parallel.

“And you're desperate for a wedding. I understand. Public acknowledgment, right? Two becoming one.”

Same as Fletch wanting Yoriko for a live-in girlfriend, getting tired of stealth encounters behind park bushes.

“When I want to be analyzed, Mr. Know-all, I'll see a therapist,” says Colette with a laugh. “Thank you for a really neat evening. Fletch, are you in?” And, over her shoulder, “Good night.”

Going upstairs, Colette tells Fletcher that the last time she'd played one guy off against another was in college — a delicate, tedious business. Those college boys had been as predictable as Tim, never coming out well in a political test. Martin, on the other hand — not as predictable.

She falls asleep without reading a page. Lights on, clothes on, without brushing or flossing or applying her Retinol cream, three glasses of wine being more than she's had in ages.

Fletch wonders if gays can be reformed; he would sure prefer living with Martin than with Tim. But he remembers Grandmère reading him a piece from some paper Tim would call radical — probably
The New York Times
— that said they can't. Too bad. And Martin is good at weddings. Might be even better at planning his own.

Fletcher doesn't think reforming Martin is part of Colette's game plan, anyway. Which went fairly well for her tonight. But it appears Martin isn't going to play along, so there's no way she can go any further.

All right! Yeah!

Fletch's nose twitches. He licks it, then makes his last nightly round of the house. If Yoriko were here, he'd give her one big slurpy kiss and snuggle up to her all night.

Fletcher finds a nice spot and curls up at Colette's feet.

Fletch is in Colette's dream, barking from a great distance, though his little yapping head is right by her nose. She tries to reach up and push him away but her hands refuse to come with her arms. Light jabs her eyes as Fletcher pulls away her blanket and wrestles it to the ground. He will smother himself. Colette struggles to raise herself on one elbow. She reaches down — hard floor rises to meet her and a sharp pain notifies her she is awake. Fletch disentangles himself from the blanket like a triumphant Houdini and leaps at her again, the whites of his little eyes very close.

“Stop it!” says a woolly voice something like her own. He tugs at her, growling. He must have to pee badly … Well, better this than messing the rug.

At the top of the stairs her legs suddenly refuse to carry her. Too much to drink …

Colette sits down. Her feet look tiny from this distance. Walls warping, colours blending, everything, she muses admiringly, turning very abstract, one colour beginning to predominate: black.

One corner of her nightie pulling — it's caught in Fletch's teeth. Colette drags herself up against the banister, holds on tightly all the way down.

Bowls of Alpo and water come into focus, still full — he can't be hungry. And he's almost ripped off the metal strip at the base of the front door. “Bad dog!”

No sound comes out. His barking is hammering in her skull. A wave of nausea — this is no hangover.

Is she being punished for all the Sundays she's missed church, for too many missionaries turned away from her door, too many refused donations to Father Flanagan's Boy's Camp, St. Rita's Rescue Mission, Save the Children? She should have heeded the
Apocalypse Man, the end is near, but he'd been wrong about it coming last New Year's Eve …

Kitchen tipping and tilting around her. An eon to drag herself to the phone near the stove. Where's the nine, the one and the one? Oh no, oh no! She's passing out; this must be death.

Where's God? Jesus, save me!

The ambulance siren is louder than the Apocalypse Man's bullhorn, and the things she is saying! The things she can laugh at! And the next minute she is crying for the only mammal who loves her in the whole world. Where is Fletcher? Without him she has no one.

Someone is holding her around the waist and peeling her fingers off the front door. A scream, her scream, “Fletcher!” The seasoned professional voice talking into the radio belongs to the burly black man beside her. “Seventy-two calling … We're ten-nineteen. Convulsions, passing out.” He growls something ornery but resigned about being summoned at four in the morning, says it looks like a drug OD to him. Colette tries to say she hasn't taken any drugs, only a few glasses of wine, but she can't. He listens, then forces a tube into her mouth, and she can't make a coherent sound.