Bad Things

Please email me.

I know what happened to your son.

Chapter 6 (#u19b0b265-81c9-5c54-a1ba-67e1bf1bf5f2)

I saw the sun come up the next morning, though I hadn't been awake for all that time.

For an hour after reading the email I'd alternated between the laptop and the deck, trying to work out what to do. My first impulse was to throw the email away, empty the trash, and pretend it had never happened.

But I couldn't just erase it. After a while I understood this, and had to work out what to do instead. The first question was how this person had got my email address. This address in particular, in fact, as I have several. My main, and most current, which receives nothing but infrequent missives from my ex-wife. Then a Google web mail address, set up for a specific purpose and not even checked in three years, but which presumably/maybe still existed. Finally a corporate address, legacy of a place I once worked. It had become a dead line long ago, but had evidently never been actually deactivated.

The email had come into this last one. The person sending it had either known or found out I had once been associated with the company in question. It was a she, presumably, though I couldn't take that for granted – you can be anyone you want on the Net. It didn't look as though this person was calling upon previous acquaintanceship, and I had no recollection of the name. I typed it into a web search engine and found the usual randomers on their own or other people's personal sites, a few others on the staff lists or minutes of libraries and girl scout troops, and a handful referenced on genealogical sites.

In the end I did the only thing I could think of. I hit REPLY and typed:

Who are you?

I looked at this for a while, unable for once to even hear the surf, aware only of the low, churning feeling in my stomach. Should I send it, or not? For the moment I still had the option of walking away, not checking my mail, carrying on as I had.

But eventually I pressed SEND, and then stood up and went outside.

I drank glass after glass of bottled water, sitting out on deck, going back in to check the mail every fifteen minutes. It was very late. I knew there was little chance that a reply, were it ever to be forthcoming, was going to arrive tonight. But however different they may be in reality, we carry into email conversations a vestige of the expectations implicit in the more old-fashioned kind. We think that if we say something, then the other guy will say something right back.

She (or he) did not.

At three o'clock I locked the doors and turned the computer off. As I undressed I realized that, however it might feel during the day, the year was turning. The room felt cold.

I got into a bed that seemed very wide and lay listening to the blood in my ears, and trying to remember nothing, until I was no longer myself.

No reply at dawn, nor by mid-morning, nor four-thirty, when I changed into my work clothes and set off for the restaurant. There had been a lot of rain in the night, and on my early morning walk the sand had been dull and pockmarked, the beach strewn with seaweed. As I walked up the road toward the Pelican it seemed likely the same was going to happen again tonight. A couple of hours from now it would be raining with the sullen persistence for which Oregon is justly celebrated, which meant a quiet night in the restaurant. It was likely to have been anyhow, and Ted wouldn't be staying open on Sunday evenings much longer. The season was done.

As I walked, I talked myself down. The email was likely just the work of an opportunistic lunatic who worked on a slow news cycle. If there had been anything meaningful behind it, I believed the sender would have been in touch again quickly. What do you do if you've sent an email like that, and it's real? You expect a reply, and then you get on the case quickly. Once the mark is hooked you don't give them the chance to wriggle off again.

So I was back to the idea that it never meant anything in the first place. I worked the sequence back and forth in my head for about ten minutes, and kept coming to the same conclusion. I tried to make it stick, and move on.

Two miles is enough to get a lot of thinking done. It's also enough to work out that you're not in the best of moods. I was one of the first to get to the restaurant, however, so I got busy helping set up. Eduardo walked by outside the window at one stage, saw me, and held up his pack of Marlboro. I went out back to have a smoke with him and two of the other cooks – which was pleasant enough but also kind of weird to do after all this time, as if I'd slipped into a parallel but not-very-different existence. Eduardo's English was decent but the others' wasn't, and my Spanish is lousy. The experience boiled down to: so, here we all are, smoking, in an atmosphere of vague goodwill.

As I headed inside I was surprised, and yet also not surprised, to see Becki's car entering the lot. Kyle got out, putting his arrival a good forty minutes ahead of service. I watched him head into the restaurant, and glanced across at Becki in the driver's seat of the car.

She gave me a smile and I realized things were going to be okay with her after all. Also that I'd probably seen the end of my nascent pizza-making career, at least for now.

We got a reasonable sitting for the early bird slot, but after that it went real slow until there was just one family left at a table in the middle of the room, eating in a silence so murderous it almost seemed to drown out the music playing in the background. John sent Mazy home after an hour. The rest of the staff floated like abandoned sailboats on calm seas, hands clasped behind their backs, coming to rest in corners of the restaurant to stand and watch as the sky grew lower and heavier and more purple outside.

‘Gonna be a big one,’ said a voice. ‘Like, kaboom.’

I turned to see Kyle standing behind me. He had strong opinions on the weather, evidently. We looked out at the clouds together for a while.

‘You okay?’ I asked, eventually.

He nodded. Could be my imagination, but he actually looked a little older than he had the day before, albeit somewhat wired. He glanced around, and spoke more quietly.

‘Working on closing out the … you know,’ he said. ‘And then, well, I heard what you said. And Becki has sure as hell told me the same thing.’ He looked down. ‘Thanks, by the way. I didn't say that last night, and I should of.’

‘You'd had a bad day,’ I said.

It was quiet for a while, but I knew he had something else to say. Eventually he got to it.

‘So how come you know how to do … that stuff?’

‘Didn't do anything. Just talked to a couple guys.’

‘Yeah, right. “Talked” to them.’

‘That's how I remember it.’

‘But you didn't even know what they were going to be like. You just walked right in and let rip.’

‘I'd asked what your impression of them was.’

‘But I could have fucked up. Got it wrong. It's been known to happen, right?’

‘It all turned out fine, Kyle.’

‘But—’

‘What does Becki think about this?’

‘She thinks you helped us out, and we should leave it at that and go on like it never happened.’

‘You could do worse than listen to Becki, on this and pretty much everything else. She's a good person to have in your life. You're a lucky guy.’

‘Yeah,’ he said, wearily. ‘I know that.’

‘Of course, being lucky can sometimes be a total pain in the ass. It's one of life's major trade-offs.’

He thought about this, smiled, and drifted back toward the oven. Half an hour later a cheerful English couple rolled up, got bounced by Ted on account of being falling-down drunk, and that was pretty much it for the night. We shut up early, a little after nine o'clock.

I shared a joint with Kyle on deck as he waited for Becki, and then I started for home.

I got home bare minutes before all the water in creation started dropping out of the sky. I rolled the canopy down over the deck and took a beer and a cigarette out to watch it coming down, listening to wood and canvas taking it like a barrage of incoming small-arms fire. But I knew I was just killing time.

I went indoors when I finished the beer. As I opened the laptop I realized it was possible this might be the night when I would be glad to only receive messages from shysters and pill-pushers, leavened with the revolving after-effects of viruses unleashed on the world by kids who didn't realize how frustrated they were at not being able to make genuine contact with the world, in the shape of a proper kiss with a real live girl.

I hit the key combination, and waited.

They were there, these email shadows of the void, with their usual empty offers and demands.

But that wasn't all.