How Lucky: A Novel Read online

  Your guess is as good as mine. I’m not gonna wait around for it to happen, though.

  I’m sorry. This part just made me sad.

  Don’t kid yourself. You ain’t around here forever either. In fact: it’s probably time for you to go. Sentience over, Forky. I have to get back to work. These planes aren’t going to delay themselves.

  5.

  Why would she have just gotten in some guy’s car? (If that’s her?)

  And why would this guy just take her? (What kind of human is even capable of that?)

  Two students last year got stabbed in the middle of the day outside the Showtime Bowling Center off Macon Highway. There was a man yammering nonsense in the parking lot, and he accosted them as they were walking into the bowling alley. One of them tried to just brush past him, but the man drove a pocketknife right into the small of his back. The other student was too slow to react, and the man pulled the knife out of his friend, pounced on top of him, and stabbed him twenty-two times in the chest, neck, and face. One of those twenty-two caught him in the jugular; the kid bled out in a matter of minutes. Cops showed up, quickly but not quickly enough, and they took the guy down. Two strangers just suddenly dead in a random parking lot of a random bowling alley on a random April afternoon, for nothing, out of nowhere. The world is a terrifying place these days. We’re all operating right there on the edge of tilt, all the time. This shit can just happen. There are monsters around every corner. Pianos fall from the sky.

  It makes you sometimes not want to leave the house. But you have to leave the house. I don’t need to tell you how important it is to get out of the house, how much you appreciate the outside world when you’re incapable of leaving. If I’m not careful, I could fall out of bed in the wrong way at the wrong time. I’m aware, every day, that such a future could be around the corner. So I get out. I get out as often as I can.

  There’s a bus stop right outside my house that has years of experience (and patience) with picking me up and taking me wherever I need to go. I type my destination into the iPad, which vocalizes it to Gus, who drives the bus and is very used to me by now, and he stops and lets me out when I’m there. You think I want to stay cooped up in that duplex all day? Have you been to Athens? When I first moved here from Illinois, I used to worry that anytime I wasn’t outside when it was sunny, I was somehow “wasting” a nice day. It took me about a month to realize that they were all nice days here. Other than July and August, when this place turns into the surface of the sun, Athens is as lovely a place to stroll as any on this earth.

  On Tuesdays, I have a lunch date with Todd. Well, neither lunch nor date is the right word, because neither of us eats nor talks during our lunch date. I’m quite sure Todd doesn’t know my name. Tuesday is Azul Day at the Rook & Pawn. The Rook & Pawn is a bar/luncheonette in downtown Athens that revolves around board games. They sell cocktails and sandwiches, fancy hipster ones, drinks with cucumbers and weird herbs, and you play board games there. You show up, you pay five bucks for a table, and you play board games. There are whole subsocieties dedicated to the most complicated of these board games, your Settlers of Catan–type stuff. Some people come into that place at 11:00 a.m., sidle up to a booth, and stay there playing some sort of dragon castle game until the place closes at midnight. But you don’t have to do that. You can also come in and play Connect Four with your five-year-old. I’ve seen some Georgia football players come in and play Uno, but with shots. (The Draw 4 is particularly painful.) It’s an awesome place to go and pretend you’re fifteen years old again.

  Todd comes in at noon, every day, orders the same sandwich, a grilled cheese on wheat with bacon, and a glass of Aviation American Gin on the rocks with a lime. He eats the sandwich and then plays Azul against all comers.

  Azul is a simple game for people who play board games all the time, which is to say it’s nearly incomprehensible to the average human being. But it involves ornate tiles and patterns and points and there are squares and triangles and . . . all right, I’ve already lost you. . . . But trust me: it’s a cool game, and a big deal for people who love board games.

  They have a big Azul tournament here every Thursday night, and Todd is famous for always winning it. During the rest of the week, he just sits at the back of the bar and plays. He is legend there, even though he rarely speaks. He has his gin—the bartender just stops by and fills it every time it’s getting low—and he has his game and that’s what he does all day. He keeps a copy of the New York Times next to him, which he picks up and reads until someone challenges him to a game of Azul and he sets it aside. When the game is over, he picks up the paper again. He does this every Tuesday. No one knows where he lives, where he works, how he gets his money for his gin and his sandwiches. He just plays and reads and drinks. That is his life. Why would he do this? you ask. Why does anybody do anything?

  So on Tuesdays I head to the Rook & Pawn for lunch and Todd. Because I love this game, and someday I’m gonna beat the sumbitch. It hasn’t happened yet. Every time I have a terrific plan and a pattern to win, Todd is silently setting us both up to thwart it. He’s constantly thinking three or four steps ahead of me. And I am not thinking about him at all. So I lose.

  I’ve always found the slight grunt he gives after he defeats me—an utterly demoralizing grunt, a that-barely-even-counted-as-a-game grunt that reminds me of how lousy I am at Azul–dismissive in the most profound, who-gives-a-shit way. I sort of love it. Todd is patient with how long it takes me to play, how I have to tap commands for him to move the pieces for me, but he doesn’t make a whole production out of it, and it certainly doesn’t tempt him to have any sympathy for me. Todd gets dozens of players challenging him every day, and even though my games take twice as long as any of his others, he treats me the same as the rest of the losers. I appreciate it.

  By 1:30 p.m. my early shift at Spectrum is over, and most of the lunch crowd is gone, so Todd is usually by himself. They always set me up with a table with a tray near my head so I can drink water through a straw. (I love my autonomy, but eating out at a restaurant by myself is pretty much impossible; I always eat before I show up.)

  Todd, like he does with everybody, barely raises his head, just enough to acknowledge with a slight nod that, yes, you’ve got a game, and then we are off.

  I’m fascinated by Todd. This is a man who can engage with the world in any way he sees fit. He can walk with people, and talk with people, and curse people out, and try to persuade them to have sex with him, and run down the middle of the street naked. He can get married, he can get a divorce, he can play video games, he can cover himself in peanut butter, he can go to Spain, he can smoke a bunch of opium, he can start his own religion, he can juggle Diet Coke bottles, he can start firing at people from the rooftops. He can do anything and everything he wants, at any time. But this is what he chooses. He chooses to sit here and drink and play Azul and scowl and not say a goddamned word to anyone.

  He grabs his first tiles. I grab mine. I see a series of blue tiles that will get me points in the middle row, which is going to set up some red tiles below, and if I can just hang on to those green tiles I can maybe finish up that column pattern, and then . . . and fourteen minutes later I have lost.

  I’ve just given him a gentle hissssss that I hope sounds like Good game, thanks but probably doesn’t, when something unusual happens. Todd stands up, walks around the table, kneels next to my chair, and puts his lips to my ear. He smells like nicotine and cat urine. What in the world is this about?

  “You are too nice,” he says. He sounds like the villain in a Pixar movie. But there is a quiet warmth to his voice. He is trying to help me. “Everyone is trying to screw you. But do not stop being so kind.”

  He turns his head to face me.

  “Stay kind, kid. No one will see it coming.”

  He then lightly taps my left cheek, smiles a mouthful of yellow, knotty teeth, and goes back to his seat and his gin.

  I stare at him for a second. He’s back readi
ng his newspaper. I’m no longer there.

  Two years of playing with Todd, and not a word. And then this. I keep looking at him, trying to understand, but he’s ready for his next game. A kid behind me gives me a quiet “Sir,” and it’s time for me to let Todd play his next game. I wheel my chair back and accidentally knock over the glass of water onto the floor, where it shatters. I let out a little yelp, and an employee scampers over to clean up the mess. I quickly type SORRY into my iPad, and the employee says it’s no problem. Todd hasn’t looked up once.

  No one will see it coming.

  My shift at Spectrum is back on at three. I’m realizing my scheduling for this weekly trip actually allows for the fact that Todd will beat me quickly—a defeatist attitude, to say the least. I wheel back through the front doors of the Rook & Pawn to wait on the corner for the next bus when I ram right into someone. It’s difficult to ram into someone with your chair. People typically go leaping out of your way the minute they see you; one guy jumped into traffic once. I don’t even usually worry about it. But man, I plowed right into this lady. I was going fast, too, faster than usual. But she took it like a linebacker. She didn’t give an inch.

  She looks confused for a second, then turns around and walks right past me to the front door of the Rook & Pawn. I realize that she has three friends with her, all Asian women like her, and there’s a pang of recognition in the back of my neck. They all look exhausted and defeated but resolute somehow. Two of the women are carrying boxes full of individual sheets of paper. The other is holding a roll of masking tape and a black Magic Marker.

  The woman I plowed into, paper still in her hand, grabs the masking tape and heads right back to the front door. I am baffled as to what she is up to. And then I realize. She is putting up a sign.

  I stare at it. It takes me a second. It shouldn’t take me a second. I’m usually good at this. When it takes this much effort to talk to people, they don’t typically talk to you, which frees you from that distraction and lets you study everything else about them. One of the advantages of this is that you can stare at people for an incredibly long period of time without anyone even noticing. It helps you burn their faces into your memory, whether you want it to or not.

  It takes me a minute to know for sure it’s her. First off, it’s not 7:22 in the morning in the picture. It’s night. She’s standing on the edge of a cliff somewhere, carrying the blue backpack, with clipped black hair that bobs just below her ears. She’s wearing eyeglasses, big eyeglasses, too big: they look like the sort of glasses a dad would wear in an ’80s movie. She has her hands in the air, like she’s signaling a touchdown, or she just won a race. She is smiling. She is smiling so wide. She is smiling like she is the happiest person in the world. She is smiling . . . like she smiled at me.

  The woman I saw get into the car was Ai-Chin Liao.

  6.

  I feel like I’m about to spontaneously combust in my chair. I feel like I’m engulfed in flames. I look behind me for the poor girl with the posters I knocked over. She’s her friend! She needs to know! But she’s gone. Where did she go?

  When I spin my chair around, a small crowd is staring at me. This makes sense. I just smashed into a lady, then spun my chair around and stared at the front door of a board game café for an eternity while making grunting sounds. I would be staring at me too.

  I try to make eye contact with one particular person looking at me, mouth agape. He’s tall and lanky and older than all the college kids surrounding me. He’s wearing a Rook & Pawn hat. He works here! He’s an authority figure! I start grunting and spitting a bit, trying to get his attention and make sure he knows that I’m trying to tell him something. He leans over. I begin typing furiously into my iPad, finish, and hit the Speak button.

  “Girl.”

  “Posters.”

  “Where?”

  People are always surprised my speaker doesn’t sound like Stephen Hawking. It’s a pleasant, vaguely British man’s voice. A little like a mechanical, stilted Colin Firth. They give you a few options, and I like the aura of sophistication the English lilt gives me.

  The Rook & Pawn guy gawps at me blankly. I repeat in my vaguely British computer voice.

  “Girl.”

  “Posters.”

  “Where?”

  He at last understands what I’m trying to say. “Oh, sorry,” he says, fumbling with a cup of coffee in one hand and some loose papers in another. “I think she went over to the 40 Watt.” I try to nod at him and then spin back around. I have to catch her.

  The 40 Watt Club is a famous Athens music club just across the street from the Rook & Pawn. It’s one of the most influential rock clubs on the planet—R.E.M. essentially was invented there, and Nirvana played there right before they exploded, in October 1991—but during the day it just looks like an abandoned storefront. There’s no crosswalk between the Rook & Pawn and the 40 Watt, so I have to speed over to the street corner and wait for the light. Even then I have to make extra sure some crazy idiot college kid staring at his phone doesn’t run the red and scatter parts of me and my chair all across the Creature Comforts brewery. I wait and wait and wait and wait and finally zoom zoom zoom.

  I nearly flip my chair over making the hard left to the 40 Watt. Some guy yelps as I fly by and even gives me the “Slow down there!” line that I hate so much. I floor it to the 40 Watt. The posters are visible, on the wall there and at the diner next door. The Asian woman and her friends are not. I spin back around, left, then right, and don’t see any of them, anywhere. I must look ridiculous, this drooling grunting kid in his chair doing 360s on the Broad Street sidewalk. They probably think my chair is broken. I wonder how long I could do this before someone ran up to try and help me. A while, I’ll bet. I make a note to do this sometime. I should have my own prank show.

  She’s gone. Her friends are gone. I have no idea where any of them are. I need to tell them. They need to know that I saw her. Girl. Posters. Where.

  I’m not going to find them this way. I motor to the corner to wait for the bus home.

  7.

  Back home. Gus said I looked “like your dog’s a ghost” when I got on the bus. I don’t know what that means. It’s probably not good.

  It’s an easy rest of the workday. Tuesday is usually a pretty sedate day on Spectrum Air Twitter. The real action will come Friday, when the entire South treks to various college football stadiums sprinkled throughout the Spectrum Air coverage area. There is a specific level of rage that only a college football fan stuck in an airport rather than tailgating can reach, and I see it on every Friday night and Saturday morning in the fall.

  (Oh, I just realized you might be wondering how I type. It’s so simple you’ll feel silly that you even wondered. I’ve got a little ball that moves the mouse over a special keyboard, which allows me to click letters. It’s just a mouse. It works just like yours. I’m crazy fast with it now—I could kick your ass in Space Invaders.)

  After dinner, Marjani comes over. She can tell something is wrong. She doesn’t say anything, but everything takes her a second or two longer than it usually would, like she’s lingering on something, like she’s waiting on me. She brushes my hair a little more thoroughly, looks at me a little bit longer when feeding me dinner, raises an eyebrow when I fail to return her eye contact. She knows me well. And she knows when I am ready to talk. But I am not ready to talk to her about this yet. I am very, very tired.

  She wordlessly cleans up the kitchen, wheels me to the bathroom, and begins undressing me. We washed my hair last night, so it’s quick tonight, and she slips some San Francisco 49ers pajamas on me. I have no idea why I have 49ers pajamas. I have never even been to California. Marjani is so efficient at this process that it only takes about fifteen minutes. Tonight it takes twenty.

  I can’t stop thinking about that poster. Marjani, sighing expectantly, tells me I have fifteen minutes before bed. I am proud of my independence, and I am a twenty-six-year-old grown man, so even though I totally u
nderstand why this has to be the case—I cannot get to bed by myself—it is a uniquely demoralizing moment every night when I realize that another person, even one with only my well-being in mind, can set a specific bedtime for me, and I have to listen to them.

  As usual, I choose to spend my last fifteen minutes sitting at the computer. I open up the increasingly active Reddit page about Ai-Chin. I stare at it for a very long time.

  I was supposed to remind Travis to call the tip line. I am sure he forgot. Forgetting to follow basic instructions is a signature Travis personality trait. I could pester him about it now. But I only have fifteen minutes. And you know what? I can handle this myself, thank you.

  For the first time ever, I open up a window to post.

  I type this:

  i live in five points and i might be wrong but i’m pretty sure i saw ai-chin walking my block every day. and i think i saw her the day she disappeared. i think it was her. i’m not certain. but i know she lives nearby and apparently she had class that morning, and i think i saw her. i think I saw her get into a tan camaro. does that make sense to anybody?

  i also might be crazy and might just be making everything more confused.

  but i just felt like i needed to say what i saw, so now i am saying it.

  I float my cursor above the Post Now button for five minutes until Marjani tells me it is time for bed. I then click it, shut down my computer, and try to sleep. I had to say something. Right?

  Wednesday

  8.

  Marjani’s main job is to watch people die. This is not her only job, but as she told me once, “It’s my only important one.” Marjani cleans, Marjani cooks, Marjani mops, Marjani dresses, Marjani bathes, Marjani sweats away for the benefit of richer, whiter people who see her every single day but never notice her. Marjani knows that “to be with someone as they die is the only thing in the world that matters.”