How Lucky: A Novel Read online

  It’ll be better tomorrow. You are right. I do need to rest.

  We all need to rest.

  I slope my head toward my desk. I am tired, but I need to wind down, check in with work, get synced back up with my real life. I have been tailgating, and passing out right there in the middle of campus, and pretending I’m Columbo, or Batman, and I’ve ignored my regular world and responsibilities. I’ve only billed five hours with Spectrum in the last three days. Not even the prisoners they employ to do this job could get away with those few hours.

  I scroll through my email as Marjani pulls down the shades, always the five-minute warning: it’s her passive-aggressive Wrap it up, pal. There are no angry missives from my bosses at Spectrum, no emails from Mom in the tropics, not much of anything going on. We spend too much time, when we are away from our computers, worrying about what we are missing. The answer is almost always Not much.

  Except Jonathan. There are four new emails from him. They are progressively shorter.

  Marjani looks at herself in the mirror after laying me down in bed.

  Please leave the iPad. I am not done reading.

  I will see you tomorrow. Do not stay up too late. I have to go. I am sorry.

  Goodbye, Marjani. May I have my iPad now?

  She leaves. I take a deep snort. The first email came at 3:30 p.m.

  Daniel

  Sorry about that. I just get frustrated sometimes. Doesn’t it get frustrating for you? You try to be a good person, you try to do the right thing, and everyone thinks you’re an asshole anyway. That’s all I’m trying to say. It sticks in my craw. Does it stick in your craw?

  This is one great thing about Ai-Chin: She’s different. She doesn’t think she’s owed anything. She just accepts me for who I am. She didn’t at first. But she is understanding me so much better. We are understanding each other so much better. She even called me by my name today. Her English is improving. I am happy to do that for her.

  Regardless: I didn’t mean to sound so angry. That’s something you’ll learn about me: Sometimes it just pours out like that. But then it goes away. Just as quickly.

  Promise!

  Best,

  Jonathan

  4:54 p.m.

  Daniel—

  Are you at the football game? I find this town’s infatuation with football pathetic. Just a bunch of pituitary cases smashing each other in the face. And all the good ole boys down here, they think it’s the only thing that matters in the world. They sit out there with their perfect wives and their perfect hair and their dumbass golf shirts, and they scream and yell at black boys they’d never associate themselves with otherwise. If they saw their favorite player on the street wearing regular clothes, they’d cross to the other sidewalk. It’s embarrassing. I hope you’re not at the football game. I hope you are better than that.

  Best,

  Jonathan

  6:58 p.m.

  Daniel—

  Sorry, I know, too many emails. I sometimes talk too much. Everyone always says that. I don’t feel like I talk too much. I think I’m totally normal. You know that movie Punch-Drunk Love? The weird one with Adam Sandler? He’s at a dinner party, and everyone there thinks he’s a weirdo, and somebody asks him, “Do you feel like there is something wrong with you?”

  He says, “I don’t know if there is anything wrong because I don’t know how other people are.” I don’t think there’s anything wrong with me. But I don’t know how other people are.

  This is why I’m happy we can talk, Daniel. I think you and I are not like other people.

  I may go to bed. I’ll keep an eye out for your email. Write back!

  Best,

  Jonathan

  And then one more, at 10:01 p.m. This one arrived about five minutes ago. Unlike the others, it got caught by my spam filter. It doesn’t take long to realize why.

  It reads:

  我叫爱钦 我被困在一个小屋里 我不知道我在哪里。 有一个叫约翰的人，违背了我的意愿，抱着我。 我需要帮助 你是谁？ 可唔可以幫吓我呀?

  With great effort, I turn my head behind me. There is no one there.

  Sunday

  42.

  I wake up to sunshine, bright sunshine, noontime sunshine. Why am I still lying here? I hear a television in the other room playing a football game. Is there NFL on? Is it the afternoon? How long was I sleeping? I am confused. Why has no one gotten me out of bed?

  I roll over, away from the wall on one side of my bed, and I blink my eyes to get them moving. I look up and there is a dog. He is a Doberman pinscher, one of those dogs with the lean, chiseled, angular face that looks like a bullet pointed at you. His mouth foams. He stares at me for several seconds, with curiosity at first, then menace. His eyes are venom and blood.

  He leaps at my throat. I fall backward into the wall and smash my head, which wakes me up for real this time. I am covered in sweat and urine, gasping for air.

  43.

  It is still the afternoon. There is still NFL on the television. Marjani is cleaning me off in the bathtub.

  “I came by this morning, first thing, but you were still sleeping,” she says, throwing an armful of wet clothes in a plastic trash bag. Ninety percent of her daily activities involve offhandedly doing things that would make most people gag. “And you were very deep sleeping. I was in fact worried at first! But you were resting in the way that you needed. You needed to be down. So I let you be down.”

  The light is shining too bright today. There must be so many hungover people out there. If you saw what a college campus looks like after a hundred thousand drunk people come into town and tear the place apart for fifteen hours, and then realized the work that people have to do to clean it up, you’d feel too guilty to ever attend a football game again. Marjani is already covered in soot and grime and beer and god knows what else. She smells like she slept in a dumpster outside a Waffle House, but she just spent the morning cleaning up tailgates. As she sticks a washcloth so far into my right ear that I can hear it with my left, I scrunch up my nose in disgust. Travis calls this my Tryin’ to Be an Anus face. I am all puckered and tight.

  She dries me off, pulls some pants and a shirt on me, and straps me back in my chair. “You now get to have breakfast for lunch,” she says. “Though it’s just eggs either way.”

  It is the afternoon. I am not sure I have ever slept so long and hard in my life.

  Before Marjani takes me on our Sunday walk, I open up the email again.

  我叫爱钦 我被困在一个小屋里 我不知道我在哪里。 有一个叫约翰的人，违背了我的意愿，抱着我。 我需要帮助 你是谁？ 可唔可以幫吓我呀?

  Is this maybe Jonathan taking the joke too far? Officer Anderson said he was desperate to be involved, and learning Chinese is certainly desperate. I didn’t even know keyboards had a Chinese-language option. He must have a Mac.

  I cut and paste the email into Google Translate, which of course he could have done the other way.

  And this is what comes out:

  My name is Aegean. I am trapped in a hut. I don’t know where I have a man named John who is against me, holding me. I need help. who are you? Can you scare me?

  I stare at the computer and don’t have the foggiest idea what to say. What is this, exactly?

  I immediately forward the email to Officer Anderson. I don’t know if it’s real—boy, though, it sure seems real! Right? It seems pretty real to you, yeah?—but he’s the only other person who has ever talked to Jonathan and he’s a police officer and holy shit that email scared the shit out of me.

  I type:

  im sorry to keep bothering you but this is v v weird man. do you think maybe we should check on him again? should i keep emailing with him? can u call travis?

  I stare at the email a little longer. The translation is off, but something is obviously up. If Jonathan is such a psycho that he is writing pretend notes from Ai-Chin and then sending them through Chinese Google Translate ju
st for my benefit, would his English be THIS bad? That doesn’t seem right at all, but then again, it doesn’t seem right that he’d call the police confessing to crimes he didn’t commit in the first place. The tone doesn’t sound like Jonathan, but then again, who has a tone that sounds like Google Translate?

  And what if she’s really there?

  I’m going to show Marjani the email, but not yet. We have our ritual Sunday walk first, and I want her to live in a world where she’s not as bewildered by what’s going on a little bit longer. Travis used to do something like this in college, never looking at his bank account or the receipts from the ATM so that he could have emotional deniability of just how broke he really was.

  She always pushes me a little faster on Sundays. She has so much work to do that even though this is certainly the best part of her day—cleaning my dick and balls, putting me in clean underwear and whatever clothes she can find that will still hang on me, shoving eggs in my mouth, three-quarters of which is just going to fall out anyway, pushing my limp ass around campus, hauling me back into the same chair she just found me in, receiving no thanks other than my mean jokes about how bad she smells, of course this is the best part of her day—she has to rush through it. I don’t mind the hurry. It’s a cool afternoon, a sure 6 or 7 on the WIZometer, and the wind feels clean and crisp in my face.

  “So you were with Travis at the game?” she says, with an odd lilt to her voice. “Was he with that girl? She is suddenly here a lot, I think.” I don’t say anything, because I have a very serious disease that atrophies my muscles to the point that they are too weak to make cogent, discernible words, a fact Marjani is aware of and a sign that this conversation is more for her than it is for me.

  “I believe he needs a nice girl like that,” she says. “Travis is a good boy, but he is old now. He is not a boy anymore. It is too much, with all the nights out, and all the music concerts, and the marijuana. He needs a good girl. He needs to grow up. He needs a house, his own house, for a family. He is no boy anymore.”

  Marjani often has these unsolicited thoughts on Travis’s life, but they’re usually more scolding than this, and more to the point, they’re usually when Travis is standing right next to her.

  “He has been such a good friend to you, for so long,” she says as we turn the corner back onto Agriculture Drive and onward up to my house. “He was with you when you were children, always watching out for you. And he has been with you here now. He takes you where you need to go, he puts you in the back of that terrible truck of his, he comes to see you nearly every day. What a good friend he has been.”

  It is beginning to dawn on me that this conversation is not meant for Travis at all.

  Marjani leans down to me as we approach my front porch.

  “Daniel, this girl, I hope she is good for him,” she says, staring into my eyes. I thought she was in a hurry? “But if it is not this girl, there will be another one. Someday a girl is going to show up, and she will never leave. They will start their own family. He will need to have his own life. He will always be there for you. But he will not always be able to be”—and here she raises her hand and spins it around—“This. Do you understand that?”

  I do understand this. Why do you think I do not understand this? And why is this coming up now? Well, with any luck, I’ll keel over in plenty of time for him to have that family you want for him.

  “This is not a funny joke.”

  Poor Marjani. Only an exhausted Marjani would bring this up. Only a deeply exhausted Marjani would say something so undeniably true and final.

  I grunt a little, and Marjani notices a tear coming out of my left eye: it was windy out there. She wipes it and brings me back to my room. I motion toward the computer.

  Haven’t you had about enough of that? Were you on that all night?

  I have something I need to show you.

  You know I do not like computers.

  It is important. It is about what has been going on.

  “Fine,” she says. “But you know I must be quick.”

  She walks into the other room to get her glasses out of her purse. She places them on her nose and squints as she draws her face close to the screen. I see her mouth the words silently as she reads them. Then I show her the translation. Her face goes white.

  “Oh, Daniel,” she says. “This is very bad.”

  Is it?

  Why are you still talking to this person?

  He seemed lonely. I sort of . . . I guess we sort of understood each other? I am not sure.

  Either this man is deeply disturbed and has taken his little game with you too far or . . . it’s something worse. When did you get this email?

  Last night, I guess. I slept a very long time.

  Have you shown this email to anyone?

  I forwarded it to the cop. I haven’t heard back.

  We need to call him.

  It’s very creepy.

  We also need to call Travis. Right now.

  “We need to call Travis,” she says out loud, after she says it to me. “We need to call him right now.”

  44.

  Yes, yes, you need to check your email,” Marjani says. “Right now.”

  After leaving a message to Travis telling him to come over right this second, Marjani called Officer Anderson, and now she’s put him on speakerphone. “Ma’am, I’m on the road, I can’t look at my phone right now,” he says, faintly annoyed. No one in the disabled kid’s house will stop bothering him.

  “You need to pull over, this is important,” she says.

  “Can’t you just tell me what’s in the email?” he says.

  “Daniel sent you an email that he got from Jonathan.”

  “He’s still talking to Jonathan. I thought I told him Jonathan was full of it.” I hear someone else, his partner I guess, chuckle in the background.

  “Yes, but Jonathan has sent him some very disturbing emails.”

  “He’s a disturbed person, ma’am.”

  “Yes, but Daniel got one that was in Chinese.”

  “Come again?”

  “Jonathan sent an email that was in Chinese, and we translated it, and it looks like it is from Ai-Chin.”

  “What?”

  “He says, wait, sorry, she says that he has her and that she needs help.”

  “He said it?”

  “No, she said it.” Marjani’s patience is eroding. “Can you please just look at the email?”

  Officer Anderson sighs deeply. “Hang on a second, I’m driving.” I hear him say to his partner, “Open up my email.” We hear a lot of scraping and fumbling and the partner mumbling “What am I looking for here?” Officer Anderson says he’s looking for an email from me, and the partner makes a joke about there being nothing in here but Viagra spam. Marjani might throw this phone through the wall in a second.

  “Oh, I see it,” he says to Officer Anderson, and he begins to read the last email out loud. He stops when he gets to the Chinese. I hear them murmur to each other but cannot make out what they are saying. There’s more fumbling, and then Officer Anderson picks back up.

  “All right, we got what you sent us,” he says. “That is . . . very odd. Even for him.” He is silent for a few seconds. “OK. We’ve got a few more stops to make today, but we’ll try to pop by his place before we check out tonight. The fact that he’s bothering you so much is enough for us to want to have a little talk with him.”

  Marjani gives me a nervous thumbs-up.

  What should I do?

  What do you mean?

  Should I keep emailing with him?

  “Should he keep emailing with him?” she asks.

  Officer Anderson consults with his partner again. I hope his partner is older and wiser than he is. Maybe he’s Lenny from Law & Order. Or Columbo. Or just a particularly inquisitive dog. Maybe he’s Hooch?

  “It looks like he’s been eager for you to respond,” he finally says. “Go ahead and write him back, make him think everything’s normal. Keep hi
m talking.”

  Wait, I thought everything was normal?

  “Can you maybe come by here too?” Marjani says. “We are a bit rattled over here.” Marjani does look rattled. And this makes me worry that I’m perhaps not rattled enough. Should I be more rattled?

  “I’m not sure we’ll have time for that, but do have Daniel let us know if he makes any threats or anything,” he says. “We’ll try to check him out for you today, OK?”

  Marjani thanks him and makes him promise he will answer if she calls again. He agrees, exhaustion in his voice.

  Marjani hangs up and takes a towel to wipe my face. She then wipes her own and sits down at the kitchen table.

  Thank you.

  I do not like this. I do not like this one bit. Where is Travis?

  You have to go. You’re going to be late to do . . . everything.

  I do not think you should be alone here.

  It’s fine. It’s nothing. I forwarded the email to Travis, too.

  This is very frightening. Is the officer sure this man is harmless?

  Yes. You’re overreacting. It’s fine. I should have never showed that to you.

  But I am not so certain.

  “Look,” Marjani says, and I catch her eyeing her jacket, hanging on the door. She can be worried all she wants, but she does have hours and hours of work to do. She can’t diddle around here much longer, and she knows it. And I know it too. “I will try to come by later tonight, when I have a break, after the press conference. But I am not sure: those often run late.”

  Another of Marjani’s jobs is to serve sodas and snacks to the reporters who show up for Kirby Smart’s weekly day-after press conferences. It’s another crap job, but she does get to see Kirby.

  “And,” she says, pulling her phone out of her jacket, “Travis better be here by tonight anyway.” She calls him, gets his voice mail, voice mail he will never check, and, after a deep breath, unloads on him:

  “Travis. It is Marjani. Daniel needs you. You need to get over here as soon as possible. I have to leave, but he will be waiting. This is an emergency.” She pauses. “Well, not an emergency. I did not mean to alarm you. It’s not an emergency yet. But it could be. Just get here. Bring your girlfriend if you have to. I like her. Well, I don’t really know her. But she seems nice. But I need you here now. Not an emergency. But please get here.” She pauses again, and looks at me.