Cult Classic(25)

“You don’t know Dave Egan, do you?”

Whatever social circles Dave jogged in, they did not intersect with Vadis’s.

“No,” she said, as he receded into the distance. “Maybe…”

“What do you mean, ‘maybe’?”

“I think we’re Facebook friends.”

“How do you even know who you’re Facebook friends with at this point?”

“Through you,” she said, still craning her neck.

“I don’t even think I’m friends with Dave Egan on Facebook.”

“Why does it matter?”

“Because you can barely pick your actual friends out of a lineup.”

Dave made a right onto Chrystie Street and vanished, the neon soles of his sneakers turning into little points of color. Vadis was half-listening, squinting between buildings. A woman in a bandeau top walked by, slurping up a gyro like it was the greatest thing she’d ever put in her mouth, and my stomach rumbled. I suggested we go to a healthy restaurant at the fancy end of Canal, one that had clued in to its patrons’ unspoken desires for a few cheese-crusted dishes.

“I need you to come with me,” she said, solemnly, “but not to eat.”

“Fuck you, not to eat.”

She squeezed my arm. Her expression was desperate.

“We’re close,” she offered, adopting the posture of a bloodhound.

“Are you kidnapping me? Is that your van?”

I nodded at a white delivery van across the street. A man was unloading boxes of cactus leaves, picking up strays and tossing them back into the van like green Frisbees.

“No,” she said, as if I were serious.

“You’re being annoying. Where are we going?”

“Nowhere. But you have to promise not to freak out.”

“Why would I freak out about going nowhere?”



* * *



She walked me over to Allen as if I were a perp with whom she had developed a rapport and thus agreed not to handcuff. The shift in environment reset her disposition. Once on calmer shores, her face became composed as if nothing out of the ordinary had just happened. I told her that if she thought it was a funny joke to go back to the same goddamn restaurant for a third night, it was not a funny joke. Clive was the only person I knew who treated restaurants as personal cafeterias, who took a daddish amount of pride in requesting off-menu dishes.

Vadis sped up. I trailed behind her when the sidewalk narrowed.

“Do you remember the night, like a hundred years ago, when you told me that I made up names for your lovers so they could never be real and therefore could never take you away from me? We were very high.”

“Did you just call them ‘lovers’?”

“Yes or no?”

“Yes. You cried.”

“I did not cry.”

“You brought it up.”

“Fine, I welled. But do you remember what happened after that?”

I scanned my memory but wasn’t sure what criteria I was meant to be using.

“You went home and I left with Clive.”

“How very on-brand of you to expect me to remember events of your life I wasn’t there for.”

“Lola, I’m trying to tell you something important.”

“Have you been having an affair with Clive?”

“No! Disgusting.”

As someone who had, at various points, nearly had an affair with Clive, I took umbrage at this. But as someone who knew what a disaster said affair would have been, I was also pleased by her recoiling.

“Like I said, you went home and then Clive—and Zach actually—and I got another drink. Then Zach peeled off and Clive and I got yet another drink and another and so forth and that was the night he told me he couldn’t keep making cuts at the magazine, that we could pay freelancers twenty cents a word and it wouldn’t matter. We were going under. Then, the next day, he told everyone we were being laid off.”

“That was the day the magazine folded? I don’t remember that.”

“It was.”

She gestured at me to jaywalk with her.

“Anyway, so it’s last call and Clive orders us champagne. And I was like, champagne is for celebrating, we need martinis. Sad unemployed-people martinis. But he insists because he says there is something to celebrate. Which is when he first told me about this.”

Vadis held the pussy willows in place with one arm and reached into her back pocket with the other. She extracted a business card on cream-colored paper stock. I took it from her, feeling the weight between my fingers. The grain of the paper had a texture to it. On one side was printed … nothing. And on the other side was printed … nothing.

“Invisible ink?”

She squeezed the edges of the card so that it split in two. It was a little folder. From the inside, I pinched a piece of translucent carbon paper. There was a black-and-white design within a circle, a black bowler hat set against an oculus, and within it, a sketch of what looked like a stained glass window. There were no words at all. Vadis was waiting for me to be shocked.

“Oh my God.”

“Cool, right?”

“You guys are in a cult.”

“I am not in a cult. Would a cult have business cards?”