Free Snitch World by Jim Nisbet Page B

mere gesture, but nice. Ditto, it would have perhaps been satisfying to turn over the table. It may even have been conciliatory to duke it out with the staff. But there was no percentage there. No equity … They just ran a modest little cucina Italiana, and they ran it well. The food was good. The wine was reasonably priced. It wasn’t their fault that Phillip was in bed with the wrong people in some other business in some other location. No. That was Phillip’s fault, and Phillip’s fault only. Phillip had only the one person to blame, himself to blame, and it was a lesson that perhaps most people who had managed to achieve the ripe old age of twenty-six had already learned but had somehow eluded him.
    Until tonight.
    “I quit,” Phillip told his phone.
    “Submit that in writing,” Marci said quickly. “Word the document as a respectful resignation, along with a quit-claim, and send me the pdf. Include with it a copy of your final invoice marked net five and say as much. I’ll see that you’re paid in full within sixty days, and we’ll give you our highest recommendation.”
    Before Phillip could point out that net five means five business days, not thirty or sixty, she rang off.
    He rested his phone hand on the red and white checked table cloth. The phone was hot and so was his right ear. Both were hotter than his meal.
    He stared at the nearly full bowl of pasta puttanesca in front of him.
    He tugged the red and white checked napkin away from his shirt collar, dabbed his lips
pro forma
, and laid it neatly atop his salad fork.
    One year, he was thinking, if he was thinking anything at all. But he’d known Marci since Computer Club in high school, which made ten years, or thirty-eight percent of his life, and that seemed a treachery no amount of cognition could rectify.
    An odd noise from the phone let Phillip know that its battery was low.
    Phillip drew his attention to the phone. On its screen various widgets blinked, spun, floated, came and went. Of the five of them Phillip had written single-handedly, Corazonics controlled three.
    Let it die.
    He dropped the phone in his breast pocket.
    After paying the bill, Phillip wandered north on Kearny to the intersection at Columbus. There, at Café Niebaum-Coppola, he sat still long enough to purchase and consume a shot of Haitian rum with an espresso. But the place was too brightly lit, and the movie posters and the crowd they attracted did nothing for him. He crossed Kearny and then Washington and stepped into Mr. Bings, where he ordered a rum and coke. Before long he abandoned the drink and a ten-dollar bill on the bar because the European football game on the big screen only aggregated to the perceived sumtotal of meaninglessness. From there he drifted up the block to Vesuvio, where he lingered over another rum and coke long enough to watch a chess game. But it turned out the two players were recreating a game Samuel Beckett designed to be played in the madhouse toward the end of
Murphy
, which Phillip only divined because one of the players was calling out the moves from a copy of the novel. In the first half of the game, the pieces tentatively advance toward one another. In the second half, they retreat. What’s the point?
    He wandered up the avenue. He crossed Broadway,took a left on Vallejo, a right on Powell. At the far end of the block, where Powell comes back to Columbus, he hit an ATM for two hundred dollars, around which he folded the dwindling remains of the previous two hundred dollars, inserting the resulting sheaf of bills into the right front pocket of his jeans, beneath the skirt of the tweed jacket he’d bought at Barney’s, in New York, the year they’d won the battle of the robots. It was the only tweed jacket he owned, and it had leather patches on its elbows.
    A block away, at Gino & Carlo, on Green Street, Phillip switched to margaritas. Miles Davis was on the jukebox. The bar was crowded, convivial, boisterous. Phillip almost felt at