The Bazaar of Bad Dreams

‘The pilot told me there were thunderstorms in that part of the world,’ Newsome continued. The two men listened closely. Jensen had heard it all before, of course, but you always listened closely when the man doing the talking was the sixth-richest man not just in America but in the world. Three of the other five mega-rich guys were dark-complected fellows who wore robes and drove around desert countries in armored Mercedes-Benzes.

But I told him it was imperative that I make that meeting.

‘But I told him it was imperative that I make that meeting.’

The man sitting next to Newsome’s personal assistant was the one who interested her – in an anthropological sort of way. His name was Rideout. He was tall and thin, maybe sixty, wearing plain gray pants and a white shirt buttoned all the way to his scrawny neck, which was red with overshaving. Kat supposed he’d wanted to get a close one before meeting the sixth-richest man in the world. Beneath his chair was the only item he’d carried in to this meeting, a long black lunchbox with a curved top meant to hold a Thermos. A workingman’s lunchbox, although what he claimed to be was a minister. So far Mr Rideout hadn’t said a word, but Kat didn’t need her ears to know what he was. The whiff of charlatan about him was even stronger than the smell of his aftershave. In fifteen years as a nurse specializing in pain patients, she had met her share. At least this one wasn’t wearing any crystals.

Now tell them about your revelation, she thought as she carried her stool around to the other side of the bed. It was on casters, but Newsome didn’t like the sound when she rolled on it. She might have told another patient that carrying the stool wasn’t in her contract, but when you were being paid five grand a week for what were essentially human caretaking services, you kept your smart remarks to yourself. Nor did you tell the patient that emptying and washing out bedpans wasn’t in your contract. Although lately her silent compliance was wearing a little thin. She felt it happening. Like the fabric of a shirt that had been washed and worn too many times.

Newsome was speaking primarily to the fellow in the farmer-goes-to-town getup. ‘As I lay on the runway in the rain among the burning pieces of a fourteen-million-dollar aircraft, most of the clothes torn off my body – that’ll happen when you hit pavement and roll fifty or sixty feet – I had a revelation.’

Actually, two of them, Kat thought as she strapped a second TENS unit around his other wasted, flabby, scarred leg.

‘Actually, two revelations,’ Newsome said. ‘One was that it was very good to be alive, although I understood – even before the pain that’s been my constant companion for the last two years started to eat through the shock – that I had been badly hurt. The second was that the word imperative is used very loosely by most people, including my former self. There are only two imperatives in human existence. One is life itself, the other is freedom from pain. Do you agree, Reverend Rideout?’ And before Rideout could agree (for surely he would do nothing else), Newsome said in his waspy, hectoring, old man’s voice: ‘Not so goddam tight, Kat! How many times do I have to tell you?’

‘Sorry,’ she murmured, and loosened the strap.

Melissa, the housekeeper, looking trim in a white blouse and high-waisted white slacks, came in with a coffee tray. Jensen accepted a cup, along with two packets of artificial sweetener. The new guy, the bottom-of-the-barrel so-called reverend, only shook his head. Maybe he had some kind of holy coffee in his lunchbox thermos.

Kat didn’t get an offer. When she took coffee, she took it in the kitchen with the rest of the help. Or in the summerhouse … only this wasn’t summer. It was November, and wind-driven rain lashed the windows.

‘Shall I turn you on, Mr Newsome, or would you prefer that I leave now?’

She didn’t want to leave. She’d heard the whole story many times before – the important meeting in Omaha, the crash, Andrew Newsome ejected from the burning plane, the broken bones, chipped spine, and dislocated hip, the twenty-four months of unrelieved suffering that had followed – and it bored her. But Rideout was kind of interesting. Other charlatans would undoubtedly follow, now that all reputable relief resources had been exhausted, but Rideout was the first, and Kat wanted to observe how the farmer-looking fellow would go about separating Andy Newsome from a large chunk of his cash. Or how he would try. Newsome hadn’t amassed his fortune by being stupid, but of course he wasn’t the same man he had been, no matter how real his pain might be. On that subject, Kat had her own opinions, but this was the best job she’d ever had. At least in terms of money. And if Newsome wanted to continue suffering, wasn’t that his choice?