TM 191 -- Where do you see yourself in twenty years?
A woman walks into a bar in Intercourse, Pennsylvania.
It sounds like the beginning of a joke, but if so, it isn't Nathan's style. I walk into the dim room, look around and see the answer to my question, sitting at the bar. He looks the same as ever -- or, the same as he ever looked without the mask, though I didn't see him that way very often.
"Hi there, Wade," I say, raising an eyebrow as I walk up behind him. "Intercourse?"
He turns his head when he hears my name, movements eager like a puppy dog, and tries not to show his disappointment that he's looking at me. "It wasn't my idea," he says. "That is it was my idea, back in the day, I thought atown with a name like that, how could we go wrong. But it wasn't my idea this time, I got the message same as you got the message -- assuming you got the message but then why would you be here if you didn't --" His eyes stop on my chest and run up to my glasses and close-cropped salt-and-red-pepper hair. I look as respectable as a woman in her fifties can hope to look walking into an establishment like this to meet with a deranged (former?) mercenary. "Man, Irene, you're looking quite the silver fox. I saw you there for a minute, I might almost have thought you were. . ."
I poke him in the shoulder. "If you say Bea Arthur, I will find a way to kill you."
Wade shrugs, turns back to his beer. "Some women never learn to take a compliment." He waves to the bartender. "Three more down here. We're drinking to Bea, rest her soul."
"You're never going to get old, are you, Wade?" I say, and almost manage a smile. "I've been wondering what you'll do with yourself until the Olsen twins hit menopause."
"Spoken like a woman who hasn't seen Geena Davis's latest Liberty Mutual commercial. Also, the Lohan-Storm triplets are looking quite ripe. And the powers add just that extra bit of sizzle."
"I guess it's hard to resist identical blondes who dance around the stage in their underwear and then spontaneously combust. Though with all the trouble they've gotten into, maybe Johnny wishes he had invested in some asbestos condoms." Wade makes a face and I concede, "There might be a downside."
The bartender comes to us with three pints of beer. I take mine, Wade takes his, and I say, "Three?"
"You got the message?"
"I got the message," I agree.
"We're both message-ees, so wait here until the message-ER --"
"Oh," I say, taking a drink. "I thought maybe -- Domino."
Wade looks at me over his glass, and speaks as though I might be the one who's a little insane. "Domino died." I notice, for the first time, that his eyes look tired. Almost as tired as I feel.
"I know that," I answer. "But then so did --"
"Yes."
"And we're waiting for him."
"Yes. Did you get a message or didn't you?" he snaps, and it occurs that he's an old man, that I'm not so young myself, that we wouldn't be here in a bar in an obscenely named town waiting to meet someone who's dead if either one of us had a life that made us very happy. Wade swirls his drink and looks down at it. "When's the last time you saw him?"
I stare. "The last time I saw him is when he died. Have you -- since then --?"
"Oh," he says. "No. I just thought maybe. . .if anybody would have seen him. . ."
"Cable's dead, Wade."
"And yet we're waiting for him."
"We're waiting for him."
We both look at the beer. "If he doesn't hurry up," Wade says, "that's going to get warm."
"He better hurry up," I agree.
Behind the bar, the second hand moves around a neon clock advertising Iron City Beer. It moves once, twice, five, twenty times. I never knew Wade could be quiet for that long. I think, with a surge of panic, that he must be dead. I look over. He meets my eyes.
"Nate isn't coming," he says.
"He's not," I agree.
"There's no way," he says.
"No chance in hell," I agree.
Behind us, the door opens.
And we both turn around to look.