He didn’t and, frankly, felt relieved he didn’t — better the Mikey you know than the Mikey you didn’t — but still, he thought, rising from the chair in which he’d been sitting, it could be a trap. “Well,” he said, lacing his fingers, pushing them through some rich semaphore, wigwagging weariness, beddie-byes, all the studied repertory of his Mac- Guffin handjobs and shrugs, his shakelegs and stiffness-be-gones, auditioning the full range of his showboat moods from the good-talkin’-to- yas to his see-you-in-the-mornin’s. “I guess I’ll be going up,” he said. “Shall I get the light or will you do it?”
“I’ll do it, Dad,” Mikey said. “Good night, now.”
“Good night,” said Druff. And then, checking himself before passing through it, turning slowly around in the kitchen doorway, poised there for a curtain speech like the vaudeville bang of a rim shot, only tossed off, thrown away, scored against the pace of the scene, as if to say, God knows why I’m telling you this, or what made me think of it just now, but while it’s fresh in my head, and before I forget, let me try this on for size, see how it plays in Peoria, Druff said, “Oh, hey, I meant to tell you, I almost forgot. In the cab — it’s been a long night, Doug was tired so I sent him home and picked up a cab at their hotel — Scouffas and whoozis’s — well, I don’t know where it came from, but anyway there was more traffic for that time of night than you can shake a stick at, and normally I might not have noticed it but it hadn’t been there earlier — and a good thing — when we were pacing off the marathon and, incidentally, did you know you don’t actually have to strap the little sucker to your leg like some Boy Scout’s pedometer, or even hold it in your hand like you’d find your way through the woods with a compass, but almost just stick it there in the chauffeur’s pocket and forget about it while Doug or whoever just cruises along as if he didn’t have a care in the world, or the fate of an entire city’s hopes and dreams for a marathon of its own wasn’t riding on every little bump and grind in the road, every pothole and manhole cover, every cobblestone and speed bump, or forget about it, that is, as long as the guy doesn’t have to pull up short or come to any sudden stops — the damn thing’s so sensitive and is programmed to make every conceivable adjustment and compensation, except, as I say, for sudden stops, and that’s why I say it’s a good thing that that traffic wasn’t there earlier in the evening when McIlvoy and Doug and Irv Scouffas and I were doing the dry run of the dry run of the dry run of the contemplated battlefield or it might just have played Oh, Well, Back to the Drawing Board with all our plans — when I happened to notice these long delays on some of the traffic signals, particularly on the cautious left turn on greens, but on lots of others too, especially where the pedestrian activates the signal in order to put the green light in her favor, and I say her favor advisedly because I suddenly flashed on Su’ad, on how it might have happened to her, just that very way, stepping off the fatal curb at just the fatal moment when she became impatient and the hit-and-fatal-goddamn-run driver slammed all that fatal second-per-second tonnage and momentum into her frail, mortal Shiite bones. What do you think, Mikey? What do you think, kid? Is that a scenario you can live with?”
The father studied the son during all this long speech, carefully watching his boy’s face as, wide-eyed, it bumped along in the eddies of information then pulled up short, and opened out again into the avenues of its snarled syntax. Abruptly, when Druff came to Su’ad’s name, Mikey’s eyes squeezed shut, but it was difficult to imagine that he was not seeing her anyway, despite whatever layers of darkness he interposed between the light and his sealed, locked lids.
And didn’t wait for an answer, going instead, and at a pretty good clip, too, particularly for a guy of his advanced age at this advanced time of the night, up the stairs to the bedroom, tired, of course, but not a little compensated for his troubles by adventure’s and danger’s spiced, chemical buzz, interested, observing himself, thinking, Oh, right, so that’s how they do it. Sure, right, yes, of course. (Removing a shoe, pulling a sock.) Thinking, I see. Ahh. But of course. Even as you, even as me. (Taking his pants off, one leg at a time.) Thinking (loosening his tie, discarding his shirt, in the bathroom fumbling his shorts, peeing a ton), Well, I have to suppose that the body has its priorities too, and that’s why, caught up, we don’t require as many pit stops as otherwise. (Thinking “we” now.) Brushing his teeth and thinking, Now this surprises me, it really does. And this! (As he bothers to floss. To floss!) But really wowed, blown away wowed, by what he does next. He takes two ten-milligram Procardia out of their plastic prescription bottle, unscrews the lid from a jar of stool softeners and removes one odd, brown, football-shaped Peri-dos softgel. He takes a Valium, considers his unusual circumstances and decides to spring for a second. (Well, diazepam, actually, since it came in generic now.) (This is amazing, Druff thinks, all those others, CIA glamour boys, or just ordinary, caught-up bystander types, professors, say, businessmen, docs off on medical convenings in Paris, part business, part pleasure, would be dipping into the generics these days. Well, why not? We’d be crazy — he thinks “we,” already translated into that distinguished fraternity of fall guys, straw men and stalking horses pursued by blurry, unfocused, maniac furies and enemies — not to. Ain’t a chap with a MacGuffin already in enough trouble? Does he have to buy into inflation and the exorbitant prices the big drug companies get for their pills, too?) Well! This has certainly been a lesson for him!
And the lesson is this:
Life goes on. Life goes on even in the chase scenes. Life goes on even as Grant and Stewart and Kelly and Bergman run for their lives. They would have Kleenex in their pocket, lipstick in their purse. In the climates calling for them they would have Chap Stick, sun block, insect repellent. They would have diarrhea equipment. They would need batteries for their transistor radios, stamps for their mail. Life goes on. They would need a place to cash their checks. They would have to get haircuts. Life goes on. They would require reservations, they would have to stop at the gate to obtain a boarding pass. Life goes on, life goes on. If they were religious they would be saying their prayers. They would continue to watch their salt intake and think twice before accepting an egg. They would laugh at good jokes, whistle, hum, wipe themselves, scratch where they itched, obey the laws of gravity and try not to use the strange, immediate pressures of their new situations as an excuse to start smoking again. They would, irrelevantly, dream. A glorious drudgery, life goes on. It goes on and goes on.
Then he moves to the bed and gets in beside his wife, dead to the world. It’s — what? — almost five in the morning. It must be a scientific fact, not noted until just this moment, that Rose Helen, whose snores (If I had a dollar, etc.) he’d always been able to extinguish simply by reaching out and touching her shoulder and saying “No Snoring,” easy as that, as if the words carried exactly the same municipal weight as his City Commissioner of Streets directives on signs (“No Parking,” “No Standing,” “No Loading“), doesn’t snore at this time of day. Druff is certain he’s uncovered a law of nature. It must be something in the five a.m. nasal atmospherics, or that snorers leave off when the birdies start up their songs, some symbiotic sound/silence deal — din physics.