Chapter Eleven - Tyler
There’s no one at the door to the suite when I open it. The doorbell rang, but when I got there, the hallway was empty. Just a bottle of wine, already open, with two glasses filled, and some roses next to it sitting on a room service cart. Not even a card or anything. I assume it’s from the hotel. Hotels do that kind of shit when you spend a fuck-ton of money out of the blue.
I guess the good news is that if they’re sending us fancy amenities, they haven’t yet put together that I’m the same dude who torched one of their penthouse residences. I have a hard time imagining that they’d be super-quick to gift me if they realized I was the brother responsible for burning up a three-million-dollar apartment. Or maybe the wine is, like, poisoned or something and it’s their way of getting back at me.
That’d be some fucked up, passive-aggressive bullshit. And while that’s a crazy thought and, I know, totally not the case, now I’m paranoid and decide that’s it better to be safe than sorry and push the cart into the corner of the living room. I’m starting to think that all the shit that went down with Carlos and Logan has me a little more shook than I’ve allowed myself to admit. I walk over to the windows and look out.
Staring down at all the people scurrying around on the street below as the sun starts to set feels different than it did from my apartment just a short time ago. Watching them then filled me with...contempt maybe? I held everyone in the world accountable for the shitty way that I felt. Because that’s what victims do. They also don’t usually see themselves as victims. That’s the bitch. The anger masks the hurt.
Yeah, I was a real fucking delight.
Stop it, dude. That’s just a different version of the same song.
Fair enough, brain voice. Fair enough.
But watching everyone now fills me with...I dunno. Curiosity, I suppose? I wonder what they’re all up to. I wonder what they’re doing. I wonder why. It’s crazy, I’ve been all over the earth twice and I’m not really sure I’ve actually seen it. Which is corny as hell, but it’s how it strikes me now. I’ve been taught things about people and about life, but I don’t know if I learned anything about either until very, very recently.
I look up and see Maddie’s reflection appear in the darkening window. She’s silhouetted by the light from the entrance to the bathroom where she just took a shower. She’s wearing one of the big, puffy Mandarin Oriental robes with the little Asian fan on the left breast, her long, red hair flowing down over the shawl collar. The Radiohead song Creep begins playing in bits and pieces in my head.
You're just like an angel. I'm a weirdo. What the hell am I doing here? I don't belong here.
Except that for the first time...I feel like maybe I do.
Shit. We all do.
I don’t turn around. She wraps her arms around me and rests her head against my shoulder. “You’re dressed.”
I nod. “Yeah.”
“You don’t wanna take a shower?”
“Nah, I like smelling like you.”
She strokes my arm with her fingertips. “Does it bother you that I took a shower?”
“Why would it bother me?”
She shrugs her shoulders into me. “I dunno. You don’t think I’m trying to wash the smell off or anything, do you?”
I screw my expression up. That thought honestly would never have occurred to me in a million years. “No. I think you’re, like, a clean, classy woman and I’m a filthy, lazy dude.”
“OK. Good,” she says and hugs me tighter. “Whatcha thinking about?” she asks.
I breathe in deeply and let it out through my nose. “I dunno. Just...us.”
“‘Us,’ you and me? Or the royal ‘us?’”
“Both, I suppose.”
We’re quiet for a moment as we watch the world continue to turn with the sound of vaguely Asian-sounding, sexy spa music playing in the background. That’s what they pipe all through the Mandarin. It sounds like what would happen if someone took a Japanese shamisen and, I dunno, tried to fuck it. But I don’t mind it right now. It’s nice.
“What about all of us?” she asks.
“Nothing, really. No judgment. Just that we’re here, I suppose. And how fuckin’ weird that all is.”
“Yeah,” she says, hugging me tighter still. “It’s fucked up all right.”
I put my hand on her wrists where she’s gripping me and realize that she’s still wearing the watch. I hadn’t really paid attention, but now it hits me that I don’t think she’s taken it off since we got back from Mexico.
“Did it start running again?” I ask.
“What?”
“Nadir’s watch. Is it keeping time again?”
She pulls her arm free from around me and looks. “Nope,” she says. “Still stopped.” She shows it to me. “Does it need a new battery?”
I shake my head. “No battery. It’s automatic. It stays charged up or whatever by just being worn. The movement of your wrist is what keeps it running.”
“What happens when you take it off?”
“It builds up reserves and goes for a while until it runs out of juice. I dunno. I ain’t no kinda horologist, it just got explained to me one time. But if it’s not working, something inside musta gotten fucked up.”
“Well, there was all kinds of gunfire and explosions and slamming into walls and the ground and stuff.”
I take a moment to ponder and say, “Yeah, none of that would account for it.”
She laughs and starts to elbow me in the side, but then catches herself and stops. I wonder how goddamn long it’s gonna take for the tenderness in my ribs to go away. It’s been almost four days already. Christ, I must be getting old.
“You wanna try to get it fixed?” she asks.
“Sure,” I say. “We could. You know a place?”
She nods at the huge Gucci sign just across the street that sits on the corner of a bunch of fancy stores that are connected to the Mandarin by a walkway. “There’s a watch place in there, isn’t there?”
“Where?” I ask. “Over in the mall?” She laughs. “What? What’s funny?”
“You called it ‘the mall,’” she says.
It’s this crazy shopping monstrosity that got built while I was away. Vegas changed a fuckton in the years I was gone. It had started its family-friendly conversion before I left, but by the time I came back, I almost didn’t recognize it. Somewhere over the years, retail stores figured out that people with money come to Vegas, and those people gamble and get drunk and are stupid with their money, and that the opportunity was there to grab a piece of that action.
‘What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas’ is basically in reference to your fuckin’ paycheck. That’s the part they leave out of the slogan.
“Yeah?” I say, in reference to her mocking tone about me calling it ‘a mall.’ “Why? What do you call it?”
“Boutiques? Shops? I dunno. Everything in there is super high-end. I just thought it was cute that you called it a mall.”
“Whatever. It’s got stores and shit, and people wander around in there like brain-dead zombies out of Dawn of the Dead. It’s a fuckin’ mall.”
Semantics.
“Fair enough,” she says.
“I can maybe get behind calling it ‘the Asshole Mall.’”
She smiles and steps in front to face me, puts both hands on my cheeks. “Do you want to swing into the Asshole Mall and see if there’s a place that can fix your watch?”
“Nadir’s watch.”
“Nadir’s watch?”
She grins up at me with this impish expression and for a flash of a moment I’m transported back to Halloween night. Before she and I hooked up. Like, maybe an hour before when I was at the station house with Evan and there was a little kid dressed up like Charlie Chaplin from The Tramp. I thought about how cute he was and that I just wanted to eat his fucking head. That’s how I feel about Maddie right now. She is equal parts sexy, and kind, and adorable, and I get that sense that no matter how much of her I take into my life, however greedy I get, it will never be enough. And I realize...
She’s all I need. I don’t need another fucking thing. Me and her and I’m good. And on the heels of that, an idea starts percolating.
“Yeah,” I say. “Yeah, let’s fix Nadir’s watch.”
Watch girl at the watch place in the Asshole Mall seemed to know what she was doing. She was Chinese and made a joke about Chinese women being the best at watch repair because of their attention to detail and their little fingers. Funny thing is she’s totally not wrong. But she has to make that joke, ’cause I sure as fuck ain’t gonna be the one to make it.
Maddie rightly noted that the reason I trusted her is not because I thought she was necessarily capable, but because I thought she was funny. Maddie’s right. That is why. But it’s not as random as one might think. It’s because funny people – like really, genuinely funny people – in my experience, get that life itself is absurd. That’s why they joke about it. Because this whole fucking dance we all do with each other is so fabricated and ludicrous that to not make fun of it feels like the thing that is actually the most laughable.
And shit, watch girl made a joke in a second language. Yo, if you’ve got the ability to be sarcastic in a language that’s not even your native tongue? Then you is one smart motherfucker and I will trust you to perform a goddamn appendectomy on me if you want. (I mean, presuming you’re also a doctor and shit.)
Maddie and I are now sitting in a coffee shop on the lower level of the Asshole Mall, drinking a couple of five-dollar coffees like the assholes we are. They’re fucking tasty though, I will admit. Mine’s pumpkin spice or some shit.
“Hey,” I start. “I had this idea.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Um, after we get the watch back next week or whatever, there’s something I’d like to do. But only if it’s OK with you, and if It is, I’d love it if you’d do it with me.”
“Yeah?” she says. “What is it?”
“I know I gave it to you to have for Mexico, but now that you’re here and you’re safe, I’d like to... give it back.”
She tilts her head slightly. “Give it back to...?”
“Nadir. Or Nadir’s family. I’d like to make a trip and find Nadir’s family and give it to them. I mean, I just... They should have it.”
I wasn’t expecting tears to start welling up in her eyes at this, but they do. She nods. “Yeah. Yeah. That sounds like a great idea.”
“Yeah? You think?”
She nods tightly now, pressing her lips together, and sniffing back a tear or two. “Yeah. I think.”
“Cool. And also—”
“Oh, Christ, there’s more? I don’t wanna cry in the middle of the Asshole Mall.”
Holy shit. I love her so, so, so much.
“I just...” I go on, risking her making a spectacle of herself. “Did I tell you what Nadir wanted to do with his money when we got it?” She shakes her head. “Well, like, everything. Like build irrigation systems in his town, and fund infrastructure projects, and build schools for girls and shit.”
Her eyes light up at that last one. “Really?”
“Yeah, really. And so... I mean I’ve got all this fuckin’ money and at least half of it is his whether he’s here or not, and I don’t even want all this fuckin’ money, so while we’re over there... You see where I’m going with this?”
I’m assuming the kiss she gives me as she jumps up and almost knocks over the table with our asshole coffees means that she does know where I’m going with it.
“What was that for?” I ask when she finally pulls away.
She doesn’t answer directly. She just takes her index finger and pokes me on the chest over my heart and says, “This. Fuckin’ this.”
I’m fighting every urge inside myself to deflect or make a joke right now, or somehow change the subject. Because there are lots of ways to show a person that you love them. And one of those ways is by sitting in your discomfort with a situation and putting your agenda aside to allow the person you love to have their own feelings. (Dr. Eldridge taught me that. Which reminds me, I have to call Dr. Eldridge and tell her I’m cured. She’s gonna be stoked.)
And shit, as long as this is the kind of conversation we’re having...
“So,” I say. “I should also tell you something else.”
She looks like she’s about to make a wisecrack herself, but she must sense that I’m being pretty serious because she just lowers her mint-infused whatever-the-fuck from her lips, sets it down on the table between us, leans in, and says, “K. What’s up?”
New-look Tyler, new-look Tyler, new-look Tyler.
“Uh, the reason that I don’t live at The Mandarin anymore...” Fuck. I really don’t want to do this, but I have to.
“Yeah?” She encourages me to continue.
I take a massive breath. “Is because... you know the night you split? Halloween?”
She nods. “Yeah. Rings a bell.” I appreciate so much that she’s trying to make this easy for me.
“Yeah, right, well... So after we... And you... And then you left... Are you following me?”
She nods and leans over to take my hands in hers, “More or less. Helps that I was there.”
“Right, right,” I say. “So after you split... I might’ve gone a little... um. Insane.”
She nods, blinking twice as she does. “K. What does that mean? Exactly?”
“Um. When we pulled up to the valet earlier, did you happen to look up?”
“Up? Uh, no. We were pretty much racing to get to Brown Chicken Brown Cow.”
“Heh, right. Bow-chica-bow-wow. Right. Um, well, if you had looked up, you might’ve seen a bunch of slabs of wood boarding up the place where the windows of my apartment used to be.” I give a toothy smile. Nervous habit.
She sort of sucks at her teeth. “Mm-hm. Why?” she asks, cautiously.
“Because of the fire.”
“Uh-huh. Which fire?”
“The one I started after you left.”
She lifts her hand to her forehead and draws it all the way down her face until it drops from her chin. I take a sip of my coffee, although I’m not sure I need the caffeine just at present.
“Say again?” she says.
“Honestly, I’m not a hundred percent sure I can walk you through it. The whole thing is a little hazy. But I just wanted you to know that that’s what happened after you left. I went a little crazy and I may have started a fire in my place. Truthfully, I’ve kind of lost time a bit. So. Yeah.”
There’s a long moment where she says nothing. Long enough for me to take two sips of caffeine that I probably don’t need. Finally, she says...
“And that’s why you’re at Evan’s.”
“That’s why I’m at Evan’s.”
“Because you burned down your apartment.”
“That is what happened, it seems.”
She now takes up her drink and continues nodding a tiny bit as she takes a sip. Then she places it back down on the table, wipes her mouth with her hand, and says, “Well, shit. That was the same night I voluntarily wandered into a car with a drug dealer and assumed I was gonna be hacked to bits or sold into sex slavery, so I guess who the fuck am I to judge?”
I have to bite my bottom lip to the point that it’s almost bleeding to keep from smiling. But then she smiles, which gives me permission, and then we’re both laughing. We probably look like a couple of assholes, but if so, we’re in the perfect place. After a moment, the laughter dies down and she says, “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure,” I say, still smiling.
“Have you ever been to Scotty’s grave?” And now, suddenly, I’m not smiling. “Like, since you’ve been back, or...?”
Rather than answer directly, I say, “What made you think to ask that?”
She shrugs an ‘I dunno’ shrug. Except that she does know. We both do.
“No,” I say, candidly, trying not to make any excuses. “No. I haven’t.”
“I haven’t been for a while either.” She looks ashamed.
“Maybe that’s something we should do, then.”
“Yeah. Yeah. Maybe it is.”
We just stare at each other for a tick until the moment is broken by the sound of a text message pinging my phone. I pick it up off the table and look at the screen. The message says it’s from one of those weird short code numbers that telemarketers will sometimes use. This one is 87-3323.
The message reads, “Plans for New Year’s?”
I know this is just some bullshit solicitation text. I get them all the time, even though I’ve put myself on the damn Do Not Call registry like twice. The thing is, they’re just sending out this shit scattershot, and if you call or text back, now they’ve got your actual phone number locked. So as tempting as it is to “text 1 to opt out,” or whatever, as soon as you do, they’ll have your digits and then you’re fucked.
And, again, even though I know that’s what this is, something about getting the text makes me uneasy. The same way seeing my dad the day after tomorrow is making me uneasy. I’m chalking it all up to the fact that Maddie and I have just been through a fucking lot and on top of that some major changes are coming our way, but the reminder that the new year is right around the corner and that I’m cautiously hopeful that this new year will bring the peace that Evan is always wishing for me is making me feel just a little unsettled. Which is, I suppose, ironic.
“Who is it?” Maddie asks.
I swipe to delete the text and say, “Nobody. Bullshit solicitor. You ready to go, asshole?”
“Yeah, asshole. Let’s get the fuck out of here.”
We both stand, throw our half-finished drinks in the trash, and take each other’s hands. She gives me a kiss on the lips, then rubs her fingers once again across my naked face. “So you just spent almost eleven thousand dollars to spend four hours in a building that you used to own an apartment in before you burned it down.”
I blow my lips out. “That does seem to be the case.”
She runs her fingers through my hair. “Yeah. You’re gonna need to build at least two or three girls’ schools, my friend.”
And with that, we saunter our way up the escalator and out the door.
Just two assholes making their way in the world.