what luck
It is a trick question, in the end.
Somehow we’re in Soho. It’s karaoke night. Somebody’s slaughtering Journey. Charlie roots around in a little teal pouch with a car key and the snort is sharp, the hiss of a startled cobra. When I find the nerve to ask about him and January, he drags a finger across his throat.
“Good news first or bad?” he asks, which is when I begin to hold my breath.
He was leaping into a limo, last I saw Charlie Maple. I’m in bed at the hotel when it dawns on me—I’d been fake-awake all night, flopping around like a dying trout, when I finally remembered him diving in through the open door. He and Jan, off to Sonoma for a partly sunny honeymoon.
That was years ago, now. Then this week, I get sent back East for a work thing, so I’m back in town. I meet him for happy hour and secretly hope she will somehow bubble up in conversation.
Long before she was a Maple, January was a Sutcliffe, and over the course of some months during our freshman year in college it was January Sutcliffe, looking my way one autumn day, who produced my snore of a life story’s most harrowing episode by asking for a back scratch.
Just like that: out of the blue, as we hobnobbed with classmates after Comp Lit on the university quad. After the scratch, she asked my name. I would’ve given her a lung.
This, the genesis of our fleeting situationship, which, in between the portions involving graphic nudity, was largely spent dorking out to Wowee Zowee, spiking our always-blue Slushies while the weather was still warm, finger painting our portraits on cardboard laid across her bedroom floor, and writing letters to one another.
It was bliss. It was blistering—slacking through the heavens at breakneck speeds with January Sutcliffe—and I was new to all of it.
We didn’t last long, but the final blow—the first and final—came at the end of Niles Brutus’ birthday bash, when she kissed me goodnight at my front door, then left to party on with him, parting with just a shrug that simply meant, No more. All gone. My face must have exposed all the uncool hurt I hoped to hide; she took one look and gave a single, Sorry.
After a week of calling without any response and another few of fractured, sleepless, basket-case moping, I realized that the terse, blasé message on her voice machine was likely all I’d get; it might as well be our eulogy. And it was hard, ending the misery of what was still whimpering, still bargaining, inside my heart. But I was still young, my case, not fatal, and my heart, not completely broken so much as gravely lacerated. I remade myself from memory and a revised, more sophisticated grasp of love’s potential to devastate.
By the time I learned she and Charlie were a thing, I was a reformed romantic, and surprised to find myself happy for them, in the way one is glad to see gone a rare and beautiful, bad luck charm. Time, work, new love, they all rendered obsolete what had once—for a brief span between us, wherever we stepped—flourished wildly and in every color.
It must have. It did. It had to. Though January still made occasional cameos in an idle dream or two.
Charlie and I worked together a century ago, hawking impoverished-child sponsorships on the streets of Chicago. In winter.
Heinous work. Every day a kick in the teeth. But amazingly, Charlie never wilted. The relentless, agonizing cold and lordly disdain of passersby absolutely wicked off him, like hard rain beading off a slicker:
“Excuse me, ma’am, do you have a minute? It’s nothing creepy? It’s for children?”
“Go fuck yourself.”
“Okay, have a wonderful day!”
Person after wretched person. Charlie’s sunny, boyish grin cracked not once all winter long, and presaged what would be a successful career in financial sales. I looted his bag of tricks (where to nab free coffee, feints of method and empathy, how to lock-pick wary hearts dead-bolted from within), plagiarized his pitch to manage those frigid months. Charlie didn’t mind. He considered them gifts.
But I still owed him. Maybe that was why Charlie and Jan didn’t really phase me. I still owe everybody at least something.
No turnin’ back now…
:What January would always say to me, whenever she suckered me onto the dance floor, into gobbling a pill, out of the last of the vodka I was anyway too drunk to drink.
:What she whispers, once my shirt’s off, in those dreams.
Charlie struts into the Ace Hotel splattering lewd greetings to me from across the lobby, then immediately starts giving me a hammed-up back massage. My old cornerman.
It lightens things, seeing him again. Old Charlie Nunchuck. Time’s been good to him. He’s actually thinner. He has a single wrinkle—one, arcing from his left nostril to the wick of his mouth.
I’m glad he looks good. Proximity to that kind of magic makes you think it works on you, too—he’s the same as before. I’m the same as before—as if you just needed a washcloth to wipe clean the grime of years and, presto chango, we’d be brand new.
“What in hell’re you doing with your life?”
I shrug. “The usual. Rat race.”
“You haven’t run the rat race ‘til you’ve run the rat race here, compadre. Grates you down to your kneecaps.”
“I thought you looked shorter…”
“Beats Daley Plaza in February. I will say that.”
“I get flashbacks.”
“Felt like ‘Nam.”
“It was ‘Nam.”
“It was literally Vietnam. Made me a necklace from the severed ears of good Samaritans that winter.”
“I lost my legs on Cermak and didn’t even know ‘cuz I lost my nose to the cold the first week in December!”
“Ah…good to see ya, Caspian.” There just may be a twinkle in his eye as Charlie hugs me. He doesn’t hug me—Charlie holds onto me for dear life.
I go, “So—what’s your story?”
He sighs. “Derivatives.”
We’re shooting the breeze, ping-ponging the last eleven years over bourbons and a wobbly pub table. We cover the old neighborhood, the new mayor, my old cat Barf, his new Mustang convertible, leased March last, that can’t make a mile and not throw a shoe. Before long he’s taking trips to the boys room and sauntering back with a maniacal grin, like he’s just heard the secret of the universe, which only means one thing, and when he asks if I would like to hear it, I tell him yes, yes I would, so he leans in and bells my ear to whisper it to me, while with his other hand, he smuggles into mine his little bag of sunshine and cosmic wisdom. “Pspspsppssp…,” he whispers in my ear.
For these moments, it's just like old times. Then I remember the real question.
But the real question, I still withhold. The timing isn’t quite right. I bear it in my mouth like gristle I am ashamed to spit and unable to swallow down.
I tell myself to be patient, it will come up naturally: January says hi by the way, he’ll say, any minute now. January asked about you the other night.
Waiting for that moment then, behind everything I say, underneath all my good-natured questioning: Why? Why am I bothering with all the strategery? What’s with all the build-up?
It’s a package deal, returning to the past as quickly and effortlessly as we have, and along with the revivified friendship, old crushes too are resurrected, old thirsts and tastes, longings and fears, and the mindsets and emotional valences that begat them too, and being nineteen wasn’t always the nonstop pleasure cruise it seems, now. Because I’m a man whose heart was not broken but gravely lacerated long ago; when it comes back, it all comes back. Now that I remember.
But when he pauses to drink and I do the same and we both find ourselves chewing our lips and fresh out of bland pleasantries to exchange and good times to recollect and old jokes to tell and dead horses to beat, I can’t help it. Charlie’s drugs spur everything toward a too-fast velocity. I glance outside; the sun’s long gone, the lobby’s full of rummies, they’re plugging in a mic, doing a sound check, and the words just bolt from my throat like bats from the mouth of a cave, all forced and cringe and obviously desperately thirsty.
“—Oh hey, so what about Jan?”
It hangs there, as Charlie blushes. I feel green. He clears his throat, unsure what to say. He’s calculating. That’s when he asks me to choose: good news first, or bad, which was something they shared, this soft spot for clever little word games, trick questions and riddles and double entendres.
This is not that, though. Not from the way he mimes a cut throat. He’s not searching his mind for a pun, and already, I can feel the mood spoiling and warping before he’s even said a thing. But there’s no going back. I tell him to start with the bad and go from there.
He begins gingerly tugging apart phrases like they are scabs, like this is delicate surgery demanding the utmost precision lest he nick the jugular. Once he gets going though, there is no need—I can tell from the rough contours taking shape where the story’s headed. This is the one about the real bad fall.
“Jan and I…well. First of all, January and I are, no longer—anything? Well that’s not completely true. Or it wasn’t anyway, now I guess you could say that…and there’s the bad part, and there’s the bad part, know what I mean? So it’s…thing is, she took this kind of—bad turn…”
Then it spills from him like fumbled coins. “There was—she tried to—she attempted suicide, Caspian. And but now, don’t freak, don’t—fall didn’t kill her. Everything’s fine. We were already pretty much done. Worry not.”
He wipes his brow—whew!—then he just rattles on to the coma and the broken teeth, the sixteen screws and the pins and the Percodans. The ghoulish metal halo. She came home. She leapt. She broke. She lived. “…And it’s been nothing but the silent treatment ever since.”
How I smile.
—‘Careful of the cold,’ Charlie would advise, would caution all the time. ‘If something goes numb, get inside somewhere or you’ll lose it. Whatever it is.’
He pretends downing more bourbon dulls his hearing too. When I ask him why, I have to ask twice. “She saw us—me and Maureen. Don’t worry, you don’t know her. We were...you know…and in walks Jan, wasn’t supposed to, obviously. My fault. Obviously stupid. Blame’s all on this guy. Hundred percent. Sure, it was bad, but I didn’t think…thought she was going for a smoke on the fire escape…” He gives a lifeless chuckle, glances over his shoulder. “We smoke out there—sometimes. I’ll probably burn in hell, don’t worry.”
Then he’s swearing up and down he’s sorry, but she was cheating too, but it’s all his fault, he’s not denying anything, but he’s not some monster. He did everything he could. He did everything. What was he supposed to? Holding his palms up and out, like he’s checking for rain.
“I still feel bad,” he says finally, and leans his chair on its two back legs. “But what can you do?” A simple, little shrug.
“What…did you do, you, you—How could you do that to her?”
“Hey—don’t ask if you don’t wanna know, ok? Don’t you gimme this…” Charlie says, then glowers at the table, furious his own disgrace is out in the open.
I have to just sit there. We are no longer in the past, no longer in the present, but have somehow skipped forward to some horrendous, downward-spiraling future meant for other people, shabbier people, raised all wrong, people devoid of virtue or sensibility, who’ve never dorked out to Wowee Zowee.
A future reserved for people without futures at all.
“…And the good news?”
Standing, Charlie slurps up his whisky’s icy dregs and then he leers down at me, all malice and spite, crunching ice cubes into rubble.
“Good news?” He tilts in, knuckling the table for balance. “I dunno guy, good news is no one’s thrown theirself out a 4-story walkup ‘cuz of you—yet. Okay? Gotta be kidding me…there is no good news. Good news is she’s not dead. Hear me? Tada! The good news is you sleep sound.”
He tries that winning smile, but it’s just a spasm. He then wanders to the bar and when the barmaid ignores him, Charlie keeps on wandering, lumbering through a singalong mob belting “Over the Rainbow.”
The world is swimming, everything coming in at the same time. But it’s funny, I’m sitting there, fixed on just one thing: for once, I know exactly how I look, how this frown screws my face to mean quite simply, Jan never would, Jan wouldn’t cheat—how funny is that? When I quit looking daggers at the sight of Charlie, an oblivious lummox mazing through randoms, when it’s clear I won’t escape unscathed, my chewed lips trip, unable to sound out what smacks me into sense: of course she cheated, we’re all cheats, and cheating, and crooked head-to-toe.
Even January Sutcliffe, with her raccoon eyes, who plucked me from my dumb aquarium life and taught me how to wear fresh bruises. Who claimed she kept our secrets in a locket of lead, safely buttoned-up beneath her blouse. Who totaled me, and later purred when I wished to God I could break her jaw. Whose lips left a syrup on my lips I still lap at but can’t taste, as I shrink away, grab a cab, retreat to the Ace, kill my bill, catch my flight, say so long, wave bye-bye. They called themselves Gerbils, January’s band. This thrash band called Gerbils. The second-last thing I recall before the time to gather myself and leave fully arrives, what hits so hard I burst out laughing—How could someone so rad want to end it all over slimeball Charlie Maple?
“January, Charlie, Charlie, January,” is what I came up with, that first night at the Fireside, a bowling alley hole-in-the-wall dive near the dorms. My words were just fine but were pitched like some forced confession to unlawful personal knowledge of their names.
“How long have Gerbils been a thing?” Charlie yawned, scoping out the room.
“At least since yesterday,” she replied.
“Long time then.”
“Forever in Gerbils years.”
His laugh made him choke on his beer, and on her face, something wakened, blossomed, I saw it happen, I see it now.
“You owe me a drink,” I said.
He planted a hand on my shoulder. “Relax amigo, I didn’t forget.”
“Yeah,” said January,“relax amigo,” landing a stiff jab to my other.
“I’m relaxed, I’m relaxed,” I insisted, kept insisting, what I always insist when completely miserable, as they traipsed off into the parched horde and January suddenly froze, did an about-face. “Oh! Almost forgot—I’m in a band. Bands drink free…” She dug around in her pockets. “But there’s like only one ticket left. You’ll have to fight it out. I’m thinking of a number, somewhere between zero and…infinity. Guess which. Think hard now, big decision, life or death, choose wisely…”
Charlie went, “Pssht, easy: one million, seven hundred sixty nine thousand, two hundred and forty-six point zero zero zero zero zero zero zero one,” then paused. “No! Wait. Wait wait wait. Ok. I got it: Five.” And he stood there waiting for her to smile.
“Charlie’s got five,” January said, and she was nearing me slowly, came so near it tingled, and a warm hint of her wild cherry breath licked my chin and made me woozy, and I recalled I was alive, at least, and life was breath, and magic numbers, and such a racket.
“What about you?” she whispered to me, close where Charlie wouldn’t hear, “Whole world hangs in the balance. Pick a number, any number. Who is it going to be? Who’s the lucky winner?”
Tariq Shah is the author of Whiteout Conditions (Two Dollar Radio, 2020). A Best of the Net award nominee, recent work appears in Pleiades Magazine, The Indianapolis Review, Electric Literature, Joyland Magazine, Prelude, Diagram, jubilat, Diode Poetry Journal, and New Moons: Contemporary Writing by North American Muslims Anthology edited by Kazim Ali (Red Hen Press, Nov 2021). A former peace corps volunteer in Mozambique, Tariq was born in Illinois and now lives in Brooklyn, NY.