Free Now You See Him by Eli Gottlieb Page B

down.
    “What’s that?” She turned to me.
    “You wanna come out with me to Padi-Cakes for a snack or a drink or something?”
    She laced her arm in mine. “You bet,” she said.
    For several years now, Padi-Cakes has been the only place in Monarch where I feel myself somehow lofted out of the town entirely. Rich hippies moving up here from Manhattan a few years ago styled the place on an Indian teahouse, with high arches and lots of fancy colored tile like an explosion in a Chiclets factory, and the visuals, along with the wheedling drone music, tend to carry the mind far away.
    “You’ve changed,” she said, as we began the process of loading the stuff into the back compartment of her truck. “You seem, I don’t know…”
    “Older?”
    I could hear the sound of a smile in her voice as she walked behind me and said, “No, more at peace, I think.”
    We finished loading and I offered her a ride to the restaurant in my car. She accepted, and as we drove, I continued to try to banter with her, but she was flowing into a new channel. She stared out the window, saying little, responding with small phrases when necessary. Now that the initial excitement of seeing me had settled a bit, she was slowing, sobering, growing more reflective. When we got to the restaurant, I parked and shut off the engine, but made no move to get out. She for her part simply continued to sit there, saying nothing. After a long moment, she lowered her head. Gently, very consolingly, I placed my hand on her knee.
    “Yup,” she said simply.
    “I know,” I said.
    There was another long silence.
    “It’s not,” she said quietly, “that I simply miss him like a kind of sickness, Nick, or that I think about him constantly, or whatever. It’s the awayness of it that I’m having trouble with…”
    “Of course it is, Belly.”
    “It’s like on a basic physical level, I just refuse the whole thing. I mean, the body that was there, vivid, so powerful—it couldn’t just go away, could it? I keep feeling there’s gotta be some way back. I keep feeling it’s like he’s in the next room, and can’t figure out how to turn the door handle and get back in. I can hear that rattling handle in my dreams. I can’t believe he’s never again gonna call me drunk from jail in Laredo, Texas, or all bent out of shape about some new Finnish poet he just read, or harangueperfect strangers in bars about sustainable planetary resources. I can’t believe we’ll never ever have another chat about”—she pronounced the word with self-conscious pride, smiling a little—“Pantisocracy.”
    “What’s that?” I asked.
    The smile trembled. “One of those pipe-dream nineteenth-century English utopias he loved so much. The British, he used to say, were into utopias because the Industrial Revolution had driven them fucking crazy, every one of them, and being an island race, the only place they could go was back in time. Nostalgia and bad teeth, he used to say, are the British vices.”
    “And drinking.”
    “Whatever.”
    “You love quoting him.”
    “It’s what I’ve got left.” Her face drew down around the mouth as she stared out the window, and then slowly shook her head, mostly to herself, and said in a low voice, “Everybody thinks they have to say something to me. But none of it helps. Nothing does, actually. Not a single thing.” She continued to look out the window, and then slowly turned to me. “And here we are with all our shitty old memories, eh, Nick?”
    “He loved you very much,” I said softly.
    “Ah, Christ!” She shook her head, and then cried emphatically, “That fucker!” She wiped her eyes roughly with the back of a hand. “That goddamn golden little fucker! We all fell in love with him, didn’t we, Nick?”
    “We sure did,” I laughed, “and he made a point of it.”
    “You know I once took an abnormal psych course,” she said, “and I learned that there’s this thing, this syndrome,that happens if you grow