Eva fixed her empty but strangely, beautifully alive eye sockets on me for a few seconds. She took a long drag on her coffin nail before blowing out the smoke with a sigh. “OK, Cal,” she said. “I guess you probably know what you’re talking about.”
“The Land of the Dead gets to you, eventually,” I went on. I didn’t normally preach, but it seemed important somehow that I keep Eva away from what I had gone through. “This isn’t a good place to be stuck in. It looks so much like life, but it isn’t. It’s like having a toothache and not being able to tell where exactly it is. If you try to concentrate on it, try to find it out, you’ll go nuts. Trust me… find something to distract yourself with. Focus on working off your time and getting out of this nowhere place.”
Eva didn’t say anything right away. Then she softly said, “I will, Cal.”
I shook myself. “Sorry. I don’t usually do that. It’s just—”
“I get you. Really.”
Fortunately, our food arrived just then.
Eva looked wryly at the enormous hamburger oozing thick rivers of cheese that the waitress lowered down in front of me. “I could say something about heart attacks, but I’d be a little late.” She started in on her salad.
“You definitely are the late Eva,” I chuckled, nodding to her low-fat plate, “and weight loss is guaranteed from now on.”
She gave me an ethereal grimace. “You had to bring that up while I’m eating, didn’t you.” She shook her head. “I think I’m gonna be sick.”
“What with?” I asked. Eva kicked my shin as hard as she could.
And we went hopping on from there. Our relationship didn’t go exactly where I had thought it might, but it was fun anyway. I might come into the office in the morning and ask, “Any messages for me?”
“Your undertaker called,” Eva could answer.
“Yeah? What’d he say?”
“Encore!”
But I gave as good as I got although Eva would ever admit it.
A few years after Eva’s arrival, our boss was promoted out. I can’t say I was thrilled about the new one, Don Copal, but I didn’t have much against him, either. Not at first. He was certainly different, though. Old Stan had been tough; he demanded premium sales, but he’d also break every bone he had to help you get them. Don stopped at being demanding. It wasn’t long after he came into our little world that someone, I don’t know who exactly, christened him the Amazing Vanishing Dictator. He’d be seen entering his office in the morning and usually, soon after, Eva would be saying he wasn’t in. Nobody ever saw him leave. Eva was not happy with the situation. She was supposed to be the office manager’s liaison with the sales agents, not his blocker.
“I wouldn’t mind his vanishing so much, Cal,” Eva said over lunch one day, “except the fucking SOB keeps reappearing.”
And without warning. He would suddenly be there behind you shouting about what a lousy sales agent you were. It was pure bullshit, but he kept on dumping it. For example, when the hottest agent we had, Lana O’Malley, made four Double-N sales in one week—a record—Copal chewed her out the following week for not managing it again. That got everyone worked into a frothing rage. The office had a meeting that evening at Lana’s favorite cocktail bar to try to figure out what to do about the situation.
“Just what the fuck is the problem with that guy?” Lana hissed, glaring deep into the concoction lurking evilly in the large snifter in front of her. “Doesn’t he know a goddamned miracle when he sees one?”
“I’d kill to make four Double-N sales a week,” I groused, “if I could find anyone who wasn’t already dead, that is.”
“Cute,” José, the office prick, said as he twirled a hunk of ice in his drink, “but is there anything we can do about Copal?”
“Ha!” Eva said, tearing herself away from the sport of chasing her cocktail onion around the table top with the little plastic sword it had come with. “Believe me, there’s no such thing as a DOD complaint form.”
“To work off our time, we have to do what we’re told,” I put in and took a mouthful of scotch for emphasis.
“Thank you, professor,” Lana snarled. “I’ve been working off my time even faster than you. Should I take even more abuse for my effort?”
“Looks that way,” Apollo, our newest agent, said. “Man, I can’t figure that dude out!”
“Well, that’s helpful,” Eva said with a tiny lunge at the onion.
Apollo threw up his hands. “I can’t say anything!”
“You never do,” Eva growled as she continued to worry the increasingly sorry-looking onion.
José’s hand clacked on the table we were huddled around. “This isn’t helping!”
“Does anything?” I asked. “No, wait,” I said when José made to pop off again, “I’m serious. Eva’s right. There’s just no procedure for this.”
“I’ve been at the DOD almost seventy fucking years, golden boy,” Lana said. “There’s no goddamned ‘procedure’ because this kind of thing hasn’t happened before! We’re supposed to be pulling together. We’re all in the same boat, for Christ’s sake!”
‘The Titanic’ was what the look Eva shot at me seemed to say. While her attention was diverted, the onion rolled off the table to find refuge among the stray peanuts and pretzel fragments littering the floor. Eve looked down and then around the table-top in slightly tipsy confusion before leaning back in her chair and giving her martini some serious attention at last.
“OK,” José groused, “so Copal’s standing up in the boat and doing jumping jacks. So just what the fuck do we do about it?”
“Hope we’ve got most of our time made up?” Apollo suggested.
Instead of a scathing retort, Eva just said, “Lana’s been at it seventy years.”
“Oh, man!” Apollo muttered. “I did not need to be reminded of that.”
“Oh, for…” José exclaimed in exasperation. “Can we please come to some kind of decision here!?”
“So suggest something,” Eva snapped. “I think we’ve all said we don’t know what can be done, so enlighten us, O wise and wonderful man.”
José just glared at Eva. Somehow.
Lana launched herself away from the table. “This is going nowhere,” she growled. “Maybe I can find someplace where I can get tight in peace.”
“I’ll second that,” I said and followed her to the door, which I opened for her because she was old enough to expect it. “Pig,” Eva whispered even as she slipped through after Lana. “Oink,” I shot back.
Outside, Lana was already up the stairs to the sidewalk and was halfway down the block. It was a night that fit all our moods: cold and bitter. Needles of icy drizzle stabbed into my skull as Eva and I hurried to catch up with Lana.
“Hey,” I said to her when we had gotten close enough, “I actually do have an idea.”
Her skull turned only slightly towards me. “So why the hell didn’t you say so before, dammit?”
“Too busy sprinting after you,” I snapped.
Lana slowed to a stop and faced me. “OK. So what’s the idea, Cal?”
“Maybe we can’t do jack about Copal. We just don’t know either way. But my first boss is still with the company. I can see if he has any ideas.”
“Not bad, Manny.” Lana started walking again, more slowly than before. “He’s been with the DOD forever, hasn’t he? The poor bastard. Yeah, see what Yehuda knows. But don’t talk to him at the office. Don’t let Copal get wise to you.”