“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Dee Dee.”
“I’m Jem. Do you want to dance?”
“No, I want to sit and talk.”
Jem stared at his shoes. They were covered with bar sludge. He wondered what people would think at work tomorrow.
Dee Dee put her beer down. “I’m only kidding,” she said. “I want to dance.”
They threaded their way through the crowd. The band was loud, funky-it was music without words. That was fine; Jem was suffering from sensory overload as it was. All these people! He wedged in close to Dee Dee and started to move his arms and legs. He was dancing, he thought. Soon Neil was dancing next to him with the blondes and he snapped a picture of Jem and Dee Dee with his disposable camera.
Good-bye, Maribel, Jem thought. He wanted worse than anything to be out of this bar and at Maribel’s house. He just wanted to look at her.
He shouted into Dee Dee’s ear, “I have to go.” He stumbled off the dance floor and out into the parking lot, where throngs of people slouched and smoked, slurred their words. A police officer waited in a car across the street.
Don’t do anything stupid, Jem told himself. He found ten bucks in the pocket of his Nantucket red shorts: another tip success. That would be enough to get him to Maribel’s house or to his own, but not both.
A driver for Atlantic Cab idled in front of the bar, smoking a cigarette, reading the Inquirer & Mirror.
“I’m going to see her no matter what you say,” Jem told the driver. “Ninety-five Pheasant.”
“Hey, man, I won’t stop you,” the driver said. “Hop in.” He nuzzled his radio. “I’m at the Muse, headed for Ninety-five Pheasant. One passenger.”
“Two passengers.”
Jem turned around. Neil was standing next to him.
“Two passengers,” the driver said. “Let’s go.”
They climbed in and the cab pulled out of the parking lot.
“What was wrong with the young lady in the baseball hat?” Neil asked.
Jem slumped against the cab seat. “I’m going to see Maribel. I have to see her, man.”
“No, you’re not,” Neil said. He handed some money to the cab driver. “Take us to the Nantucket Beach Club, please.”
“We’re going to see Maribel,” Jem said. He was going to be sick. He raised his voice. “Driver, can you pull over?”
He must have had the sound of vomit in his voice, because the cab driver responded right away. “Pulling over.”
Jem puked onto the side of the road. Gravel, a little grass, his chunky vomit.
“Are you okay, buddy?” Neil asked, patting him on the back.
“Happens every night,” the cab driver said. “Believe me when I say, this is better than some. Had a chick last week blow chow into the back of my head.”
Neil pulled Jem back into the cab. “You can’t see Maribel tonight, my friend. You’re a mess. I’m going to take you back to the Club. You need a swim. You need to cool off.”
“Okay,” Jem said. Sour mouth, pasty mouth. Water sounded good.
Jem stripped to his boxers and waded into the cool water of Nantucket Sound. Water he couldn’t drink. What was that rhyme? Rub-a-dub-dub? He plunged all the way in, and the water lit up around him, a pale, glowing green. It was like magic; he had an aura, a body halo.
“Phosphorescence,” Neil said. He waded in behind Jem and dove into the shallow water. The water lit up around him like a force field. Neil surfaced. “There are living organisms in the water, and when we disturb them, they glow. There’s great phosphorescence off the coast of Puerto Rico. I send hundreds of people to see it every year.”
Jem floated on his back and looked up at the sky, the stars, the moon. His stomach relaxed, his shoulders loosened. Everything was going to be okay, he told himself. He pictured himself pounding on Maribel’s door until he woke up both her and Mack. Jem would have said something stupid and sappy to Maribel and he would have punched Mack in the face, thereby losing his job. And for my finale, lady and gentleman-vomit all over the step.
Jem found his feet and stood on the sandy bottom. Neil was off about twenty yards, waving his hands through the water like fins, watching them glow.
“Thanks for bringing me back here,” Jem said. “You kept me from embarrassing myself.”
“I don’t know about that,” Neil said. He went under and surfaced closer to Jem. He looked like a different person with his hair wet, and without his glasses. “You stranded a pretty girl on the dance floor of the Muse, and you hurled all over Prospect Street.”
“Yeah, but you didn’t let me see Maribel. Thank you.”
“You love her,” Neil said. “Your dead-drunk behavior proves it. You love her. True love always wins. That sounds like total bullshit, but I happen to believe it. You’ll get her.”
“You’ve smoked too much dope,” Jem said.
Neil kicked up his feet and floated on his back. “When I told you the man who gave me the weed is a professional, I meant it,” he said. “He’s a doctor.”
“A doctor?” Jem said.
“I have pancreatic cancer,” Neil said. “I’m dying.” He said this the way one might announce he’s a vegetarian, or a conscientious objector; he said it as though he wholeheartedly believed in it.
The water grew cold, and Jem started to shake. He swam to shore on one breath. He crawled onto the sand and cut his toe on something sharp. He flipped onto his ass and inspected the damage in the moonlight. There was a gash just below his toenail. He was bleeding.
“I cut myself,” he said softly. Tears sprang to his eyes. He felt amazingly sad, and thirsty. He needed water. He wiped a drop of blood from his toe and tasted it-ringing, metallic, sweet. Was that disgusting, tasting your own blood? He gazed out at the water; Neil floated on his back. “Hey, fuck you!” Jem said. “Fuck you for messing with me like that.” He was shouting but he didn’t care. He didn’t care if he woke up the whole hotel. “Fuck you for kidding around like that.”
Jem heard a splash and seconds later, Neil was sitting next to him on the beach. He was kind of thin, now that Jem noticed, but he didn’t look sick; he didn’t look like a dying person.
“I’m not messing with you,” Neil said. “I’m not kidding around.”
Jem wiped at his tears angrily. Why the fuck was he crying? He’d only met Neil yesterday, for God’s sake. He barely knew the guy. So he was dying, so what? They were all going to die, every single person, no one would escape it. Jem was going to die, Maribel, Mack, the girl Jem left at the Muse, the cab driver, Jem’s parents, Gwennie, Mr. G, Mrs. Worley. Everyone. So why the tears? Maybe because life felt good-even though Jem was miserable about Maribel, it felt good to hurt, to yearn, to want. It felt good to drink twelve drinks in one night, it felt good to empty his stomach on the side of the road, it felt good to submerge his body in the cool water and watch it shine and sparkle around him.
“This is the big problem, then?” Jem asked. “It better be, because if you have one bigger than this, I don’t want to hear about it.”
“This is it.”
“Okay,” Jem said. He dug his wounded toe into the sand, and reached for his white shirt, pulled it over his head. It smelled like smoke. He looked around for his shorts, and when he found them, he said, “You had two messages, and I didn’t give them to you because you said you didn’t want them. But one was from Dr. Kenton. I should have told you.”
“No, you obeyed my wishes. Dr. Kenton was calling to tell me I’m not getting better.”
“You don’t know that,” Jem said.
“I do,” Neil said. “Who was the other message from?”
“Desirée.”
“My girlfriend full of desire. I guess she’ll be the next one to find out.”
“Man, don’t tell me I’m the only person who knows.”