Free Burning Down the House by Jane Mendelsohn Page B

the hillside lifts his black gun and he pulls the trigger and the shot hits the place where the harnesses attach to the line.
    The explosion is muffled by the sound of the rushing river. Just a shudder of foliage that not even nearby hikers would notice. Two strong athletic bodies drop down in a sudden plummet of flesh and the expressions on their faces smear from excitement to terror in a blur like a face in a Francis Bacon painting. There was one in Steve’s office. Jonathan had always admired it.
    —
    Holy shit, Grant says later when he hears about the accident.
    Oh my God, Ian says.
    Drunken idiots, Jonathan says.
    —
    Jonathan knows that he has gone too far, that Steve would be upset with him if he were to find out, but he figures that Steve will never find out. That no one will.
    And he is usually correct in these matters.
    —
    The bodies of the two Australians were found later that day. Local officials announced that new laws would be enacted to prevent zip-lining during the rapid season. Life jackets are mandatory, tourists were reminded. Flyers went up on the doors of the bars. Before they left, Jonathan and Ian and Grant stopped off at an office in a neighboring town and picked up a permit for Grant’s restaurant. Jonathan took them out for a last drink that night and held the permit up to the torchlight and turned it this way and that and said: We could have just forged this thing. It’s like a handwritten receipt. Just one stamp on it that could be anything.
    Ian’s face looked somber and confused. I keep thinking about those two guys whipping around in the water like underwear in a washing machine, he said.
    Poor assholes, said Jonathan.
    Taste this, Grant said.
    They each had a forkful of the sauce-covered fish that he was eating. He said he was going to put something like it on his menu, but with more of a citrusy flavor. It would be his signature dish. Ian and Jonathan closed their eyes while they savored the food and made odd moaning sounds. Strange, pained manifestations of delight came over their shadowy faces, under the flare of the flickering torches.

14
    P OPPY PAUSED outside the door to the psychiatrist’s office and looked quickly down Park Avenue where the buildings extended endlessly in a long façade of brownish-grayish brick and stone, emotionless and without affect. The east façade looked at the west façade in some kind of schizoid staring contest that had been going on for almost a century. Poppy looked at the door. She buzzed and was buzzed back at and entered an empty waiting room, decorated in 1966, a room that time had passed by and then caught up with again. The midcentury discomfort—which had looked sexy and original at one point in history—now seemed both antique and familiar and not unfashionable but decidedly unsexy. Poppy attempted to shrink her lanky self into the sleekly shaped well-worn couch with no side arms. Her knees bumped against a low, sad, dark wood coffee table. In a few moments a slender older woman appeared before her and gestured for Poppy to follow her into another room.
    Poppy arranged herself again, this time in a slightly more comfortable chair facing the doctor.
    Poppy shimmied out of her coat and released the straps of her bag, letting them fall like loose reins onto the floor. She pushed her hair behind her ear.
    She dove right in.
    So what I was wondering is what can you give me that would go with the other stuff I’m taking? Some cocktail but that won’t kill me.
    The doctor looked at her like one of the Park Avenue buildings.
    I mean I understand that you can never be sure how these things will interact and affect you, but I’m okay with that. There are risks with anything, right?
    The doctor nodded and began listing the medications Poppy was already taking.
    But you told me those were all very low doses?
    True, said the doctor.
    Poppy pointed her thumb up at the ceiling a few times in a universal gesture of “bump it up a little.”
    Let’s