Michael Chabon

“My backpack!” I was already on my way back into the bar. Everything was darker, quieter; glancing at the Pirates game flashing silently, in awful color, over the bald head of the bartender, I ran to our booth and grabbed my sack. It was better, there in the ill light, and I stopped; I felt as though I had forgotten to breathe for several minutes.

“My backpack,” I said to the ganged-up waitresses who chewed gum and drank coffee at a table by the dead jukebox.

“Uh huh,” they said. “Ha ha.” In Pittsburgh, perhaps more than anywhere else in our languid nation, a barmaid does not care.

On the way out again, I suddenly saw everything clearly: Sigmund Freud painting cocaine onto his septum, the rising uproar of the past hour and a half, the idling Audi full of rash behavior that lay ahead, the detonating summer; and because it was a drunken perception, it was perfect, entire, and lasted about half a second.

I walked out to the car. They said to get in, get in. Between the backs of the bucket seats and the top of the trunk was a space the size of a toaster.

“Go and fit yourself there,” said Mohammad, craning around to shine his brown movie-star face into my eyes. “Tell him, make the boot a seat, Arthur.” He spoke with a French accent.

“The boot?” I threw in my backpack. “Now there’s no room for me,” I said.

“The trunk. He calls it the boot,” said Arthur, smiling. Lecomte had a hard, sarcastic smile, which made only rare appearances, chiefly when he meant to persuade or to ridicule, or both. Sometimes it surfaced only to give a kind of cruel warning, come far too late, of the plans that he had made for you, a genuine smile of false reassurance, the smile Montresor cast at Fortunato, hand on the trowel in his pocket. “You have to sit on the edge of the trunk, where the roof folds up.”

And this, though I have always been easily terrified, I did.

We pulled into the heavy Saturday-night traffic on Forbes Avenue, and perhaps because of the incident I’d witnessed earlier, the welter of taillights around me—so near and red!—reminded me of police sirens.

“Is this legal, what I’m doing?” I yelled into the overwhelming slipstream.

Arthur turned around. His hair blew across his face, and the cigarette he had lit threw bright ash, like a sparkler.

“No!” he shouted. “So don’t fall out! Mohammad has a lot of tickets already!”

The people in the cars that managed to pull alongside the Audi gave me the same shake of the head and roll of the eyes that I myself had often given other young drunks in fast cars. I decided not to think about them, which proved to be a simple thing, and stared into the wind, and into the steady flow of streetlights. Gradually, lathed and smoothed by my five hasty drinks, I recognized only the speed Mohammad expertly gathered, and the whine of the tires on the blacktop, so fragrant and near my head. Then the wind died as we fell into a red light at Craig and stopped.

I took out my cigarettes and lit one in the momentary stillness. Arthur turned again, looking slightly surprised not to find me livid, sick, or half-unconscious.

“Hey, Arthur,” I said.

“Hey what?”

“You work in the library, right?”

“Yes.”

“Who’s the Girl Behind Bars?”

“Who?”

“By the elevators on the ground floor. A window. Bars. There’s a girl in there.”

“You must mean Phlox.”

“Phlox? Her name is Phlox? There are girls named Phlox?”

“She is nuts,” said Arthur, with mingled scorn and enthusiasm. Then his eyes widened, as though something had occurred to him. “A punk,” he said slowly. “They call her Mau Mau.”

“Mau Mau,” I repeated.

When the light changed, Mohammad pulled left quickly, only signaling for the turn after he was halfway into it.

“What are you doing, Momo?” said Arthur.

“Momo?” I asked.

“Ah shit! We go to Riri’s!” said Mohammad. He seemed to have just recalled that we had an actual destination.

“Momo,” I said again. “Riri’s.”

“You should have kept going up Forbes, Momo,” said Arthur, laughing at me. “Riri’s house is straight up Forbes Avenue.”

“Okay, yes, I know, shut up,” shouted Mohammad. He made a U in the fortunately bare middle of Craig Street, and pulled, with a loud rumor of tires, back out onto the avenue. Despite the sixty-mile-an-hour wind, his black hair lay fat and shiny and motionless on his head, like ersatz hair of papier-mâché and varnish. Another happy cloud of dullness bloomed and settled over my senses. I tossed away my cigarette and took up my position once more, clenching the chrome luggage rack behind me and taking great swallows of air, like a jet engine.

Riri’s house was a Tudor hugeness off the campus of Chatham College, where her widowed father, Arthur told me as we climbed the driveway to the front door, taught Farsi, and from which he took many sabbaticals, as he now had; his house poured light all over its immense lawn, and the neighborhood rang with loud music.

“You are now glad that you came,” Mohammad said to me, rather irrelevantly shaking, my hand. Then he barged into the pounding foyer.

“Gee, thanks,” I said.