Everything's Eventual

   This was the point where he had to move, if he was going to. The truth was no longer safe and they might know a lie.

   "There's a man . . ." he started, then paused. "Could I have that cigarette now?"

   "Mr. Fletcher! But of course!" Escobar was for a moment the concerned dinner-party host. Fletcher did not think this was playacting. Escobar picked up the red-and-white pack—the kind of pack any free man or woman could buy at any newsstand like the one Fletcher remembered on Forty-third Street—and shook out a cigarette. Fletcher took it, knowing he might be dead before it burned all the way down to the filter, no longer a part of this earth. He felt nothing, only the fading twitch of the muscles in his left arm and a funny baked taste in his fillings on that side of his mouth.

   He put the cigarette between his lips. Escobar leaned further forward and snapped back the cover of his gold-plated lighter. He flicked the wheel. The lighter produced a flame. Fletcher was aware of Heinz's infernal machine humming like an old radio, the kind with tubes in the back. He was aware of the woman he had come to think of, without a trace of humor, as the Bride of Frankenstein, looking at him the way the Coyote in the cartoons looked at the Road Runner. He was aware of his heart beating, of the remembered circular feel of the cigarette in his mouth—"a tube of singular delight," some playwright or other had called it—and of the beat of his heart, incredibly slow. Last month he'd been called upon to make an after-luncheon speech at the Club Internacional, where all the foreign press geeks hung out, and his heart had beat faster then.

   Here it was, and so what? Even the blind found their way through this; even his sister had, there by the river.

   Fletcher bent to the flame. The end of the Marlboro caught fire and glowed red. Fletcher drew deep, and it was easy to start coughing; after three years without a cigarette, it would have been harder not to cough. He sat back in the chair and added a harsh, gagging growl to the cough. He began to shake all over, throwing his elbows out, jerking his head to the left, drumming his feet. Best of all, he recalled an old childhood talent and rolled his eyes up to the whites. During none of this did he let go of the cigarette.

   Fletcher had never seen an actual epileptic fit, although he vaguely remembered Patty Duke throwing one in The Miracle Worker. He had no way of knowing if he was doing what epileptics actually did, but he hoped that the unexpected death of Tomás Herrera would help them to overlook any false notes in his own act.

   "Shit, not again!" Heinz cried in a shrill near-scream; in a movie it might have been funny.

   "Grab him, Ramón!" Escobar yelled in Spanish. He tried to stand up and struck the table so hard with his meaty thighs that it rose up and thumped back down. The woman didn't move, and Fletcher thought: She suspects. I don't think she even knows it yet, but she's smarter than Escobar, smarter by a mile, and she suspects.

   Was this true? With his eyes rolled up he could see only a ghost of her, not enough to really know if it was or not . . . but he knew. What did it matter? Things had been set in motion, and now they would play out. They would play out very fast.

   "Ramón!" Escobar shouted. "Don't let him fall on the floor, you idiot! Don't let him swallow his t—"

   Ramón bent over and grabbed Fletcher's shaking shoulders, perhaps wanting to get Fletcher's head back, perhaps wanting to make sure Fletcher's tongue was still safely unswallowed (a person couldn't swallow his own tongue, not unless it was cut off; Ramón clearly did not watch ER). Whatever he wanted didn't matter. When his face was where Fletcher could get at it, Fletcher struck the burning end of the Marlboro in Ramón's eye.

   Ramón shrieked and jerked backward. His right hand rose toward his face, where the still-burning cigarette hung askew in the socket of his eye, but his left hand remained on Fletcher's shoulder. It was now tightened down to a clamp, and when he stepped back, Ramón pulled Fletcher's chair over. Fletcher spilled out of it, rolled over, and got to his feet.

   Heinz was screaming something, words, maybe, but to Fletcher he sounded like a girl of about ten screaming at the sight of a singing idol—one of the Hansons, perhaps. Escobar wasn't making any noise at all and that was bad.

   Fletcher didn't look back at the table. He didn't have to look to know that Escobar was coming for him. Instead he shot both hands forward, grabbed the butt of Ramón's revolver, and pulled it from its holster. Fletcher didn't think Ramón ever knew it was gone. He was screaming a flood of Spanish and pawing at his face. He struck the cigarette but instead of coming free it broke off, the burning end still stuck in his eye.