#
He made pancakes and cut up pears and peaches and apples and bananas for
fruit salad.
"This reminds me of the pancake house in town," Bart said. "Remember?"
Adam nodded. It had been Ed-Fred-George's favorite Sunday dinner place.
"Do you live here now?" Mimi said.
Alan said, "Yes." She slipped her hand into his and squeezed his
thumb. It felt good and unexpected.
"Are you going to tell her?" Billy said.
She withdrew her hand. "What is it." Her voice was cold.
Billy said, "There's no good comes of keeping secrets. Krishna and Davey
are planning to attack Kurt. Krishna says he owns you. He'll probably
come for you."
"Did you see that?" Adam said. "Him coming for her?"
"Not that kind of seeing. I just understand enough about people to know
what that means."
Trey met her at six, and he was paunchier than she'd remembered,
his high school brawn run to a little fat. He shoved a gift into
her hand, a brown paper bag with a quart of cheap vodka in
it. She thanked him simperingly and tucked it in her
knapsack. "It's a nice night. Let's get takeout and eat it in
High Park."
She saw the wheels turn in his head, meal plus booze plus
secluded park equals pussy, pussy, pussy, and she let the tip of
her tongue touch her lips. This would be even easier than she'd
thought.
"How can you tell the difference?" Arthur said. "Between seeing and
understanding?"
"You'll never mistake them. Seeing it is like remembering spying on
someone, only you haven't spied on him yet. Like you were standing
behind him and he just didn't notice. You hear it, you smell it, you see
it. Like you were standing *in* him sometimes, like it happened to you.
"Understanding, that's totally different. That's like a little voice in
your head explaining it to you, telling you what it all means."
"Oh," Andy said.
"You thought you'd seen, right?"
"Yeah. Thought that I was running out of time and going to die, or kill
Davey again, or something. It was a feeling, though, not like being
there, not like having anything explained."
"Is that going to happen?" Mimi asked Brad.
Brad looked down at the table. "'Answer unclear, ask again later.'
That's what this Magic 8-Ball I bought in a store once used to say."
"Does that mean you don't know?"
"I think it means I don't want to know."
#
"Don't worry," Bert said. "Kurt's safe tonight."
Alan stopped lacing up his shoes and slumped back on the bench in his
foyer. Mimi had done the dishes, Bill had dried, and he'd fretted about
Kurt. But it wasn't until he couldn't take it anymore and was ready to
go and find him, bring him home if necessary, that Billy had come to
talk to him.
"Do you know that for sure?"
"Yes. He has dinner with a woman, then he takes her dumpster diving and
comes home and goes to bed. I can see that."
"But you don't see everything?"
"No, but I saw that."
"Fine," Adam said. He felt hopeless in the face of these predictions, as
though the future were something set and immutable.
"I need to use the bathroom," Billy said, and made his way upstairs
while Alan moved to a sofa and paged absently through an old edition of
*Alice in Wonderland* whose marbled frontispiece had come detached.
A moment later, Mimi joined him, sitting down next to him, her wings
unfolded across the sofa back.
"How big are they going to get, do you think?" she said, arranging them.
"You don't know?"
"They're bigger than they've ever been. That was good food," she
said. "I think I should go talk to Krishna."