I make it home a bit late. Karen is in the kitchen. I knock a trace of mud off my boots and close the side door. It’s pot roast Tuesday.
“Hi,” I say. She is tending the stove, her back to me.
“You’re later than normal,” she says, not in an accusatory way. It’s more a statement posed as a question. Her voice rises slightly at the end of the sentence.
“Busy day. I lost track of time.”
A silver dollar rises—flipping once, twice, three times, elevates—then halts, defying gravity. Was it contemplating its role in all this? Was I?
Tarnished and faded—but substantial—a good weight to tip any scale, the coin drops, tumbling, and disappears in my palm. I cup it and slap it, flat, on the back of my left hand. I look, confirm, and it is sealed, done.
Heads or tails? To be or not to be.
A whore tells me to avoid sugar. She said my body is Ayurveda or Pitha or some such bullshit about symbols and temples and Mother Earth. I am thinking about all this as I lay, greased, naked on her shitty, shanty floor, a rusty pipe leaking brown water, bubbling, babbling, and suddenly my voice slices the stifling humidity in half.
“Tell that fucking asshole to stop knocking, he’s early and I’m on the clock.”
I am also thinking about divine power later that afternoon at my therapist’s office. She charges $120 for a fifty-minute hour. I hate it, except when I don’t. It’s too pure, uncut. Know what I mean? The digging, the purging—the whole clan is there, isolation, morose, detachment. Shame. The room is spitting sleet and it’s an uphill drive, and I’m blind, accelerating like a motherfucker. Grinding the gears, smoky diesel drips from my ears.
“See you next week,” my khaki shaman says—I can hear the heavy breathing in the waiting room. I wonder if the seat will be warm when they settle in and split themselves in two? One for me, one for all the rest.
“Yeah, I’ll work on that. Promise.”
Eighty bucks get me 90-minutes with a south-side slut who wears a crumbling tenement veil. For forty dollars more I’m bona fide in Bed-Stuy. My whore has a face and no name. My therapist has a name and no face. I get what I need from both. Fuck me if I know which is the better deal.
The cops will find one of them rolled up in a carpet tomorrow.
And a silver dollar.
“Do I smell cobbler?”
“You do, apple. It was either that or peach, so I flipped a coin,” says Karen. “It was heads, so apple.”
“Makes sense to me.”