Big Swiss(9)

“I’ve lived in Los Angeles,” Om said.

“Me too,” Greta said.

“Hollywood?” Om asked.

“Inglewood,” Greta said.

“You know, I’ve seen a rise in borderline personalities in Hudson,” he said. “It seems they’re very attracted to narcissists. How’d you wind up in Hudson?”

“Sabine,” Greta said. “Do you know her?”

“Of course,” he said.

“Yeah, well, we live together,” Greta said. “But… we’re not lovers.”

Greta always added that last part as a joke, since it was patently obvious Sabine didn’t have a gay bone in her body. But no one ever laughed, so maybe it wasn’t that obvious. Or maybe it just wasn’t funny. She wondered how many of Om’s bones were gay. One or two, she decided.

“Didn’t Sabine move out of town?” he asked.

“As a matter of fact, yes, but we’re only a one-cigarette drive away,” Greta said, pointing vaguely behind her. “That way.”

“What kind of cigarette?” Om said.

“American Spirit,” Greta said.

“Nice,” he said. “Can you spare one?”

They stepped outside. He held the cigarette between his middle and ring fingers. More than a couple bones, she thought.

“How’d you meet Sabine?” he asked.

“She picked me up hitchhiking,” Greta said.

“In Hudson?”

“Martha’s Vineyard,” Greta said. “It was more like a kidnapping. I was trying to get some pizza, but she took me to a party on the other side of the island, said Quaaludes would be there. ‘Is that a band?’ I remember asking. I was only eighteen. Her eyes misted over, as if we were about to encounter a herd of unicorns. ‘It’s the best drug ever made,’ she said. I asked if she’d tried MDMA. ‘Yuck,’ she said. ‘I’m not into hugs and backrubs.’ Anyway, the party turned out to be in this hippie whorehouse out in the dunes. We took the Quaaludes, laughed for six hours, been friends ever since.”

After their Quaalude excursion, Greta ran into Sabine every couple of years, always when she least expected it—in line for an ATM in San Francisco, in the bathroom at Grand Central Terminal, at an Ethiopian restaurant in LA, walking down the street in New Orleans, and most recently, in a parking lot at Huntington Beach, where Sabine had kidnapped Greta (and Pi?on) for a second time. She’d been touring the country in a Mercedes Sprinter van, visiting her kids, and convinced Greta, who’d just quit her job, to join her for a few days. It had been Greta’s first taste of freedom in a dozen years. She’d essentially never gotten out of the van.

Om said he rarely left Hudson except to travel to India, to a specific place Greta always immediately forgot the instant she heard its name, but it was the oldest and most beautiful city on earth, a place where nothing was hidden, where literally everything was out in the open—birth, disease, death, lots and lots of garbage, etc.—and you had no choice but to observe life in its culmination. Om traveled to this city once or twice a year—to reaffirm his Om-ness, Greta assumed—but then he said, “Plus I have a guru who tugs on my nadi.”

Greta coughed. “Pardon?”

“Every winter, my nadi becomes corroded—”

“What’s your naughty?”

“My pulse,” Om said. “N-A-D-I. Nadis are channels in our bodies that provide energy to our cells, channels that become blocked—”

“May I ask what your real name is?” Greta asked. “Or is that rude?”

“You can ask me anything. My birth name is Bruce.”

“You changed your name to Om… in India.”

“Twenty years ago.”

“?‘Om’ is a little… on-the-nose,” Greta said, and smiled. “Don’t you think?”

“Look around,” Om said. “Everything in Hudson is a little on-the-nose.”





2


As a pharm tech, Greta had spent eighteen months working in the warehouse of a mail-order pharmacy, filling prescriptions by hand. Warfarin, a blood thinner, was the drug she handled most, but there were about a dozen other friable tablets, usually generic versions of popular drugs, and she often ended her shift covered in pharmaceutical dust. It wasn’t long before any kind of dust began to resemble pill dust, particularly the pale yellow dust of Norco 10s. She was convinced she could see floating particles in people’s personal breathing zones (PBZs). She saw pill dust on carpets, mirrors, screens, people’s sweaters. There it was again, sprinkled all over the popcorn at the movies. Long after she quit the warehouse, she continued spotting pill dust wherever she went.

Now Greta saw transcripts. The transcripts belonged to Om’s clients, and they came to her whenever she set foot in Cathedral, the most popular coffee shop in town. The place had perfect acoustics and was crawling with Om’s clients, because his office was located directly above it. Greta always heard at least one voice she recognized. She couldn’t recall the entire transcript, obviously, as they were often quite long, but if she closed her eyes and concentrated, her memory was good for several pages.

Just now, at the table where she sat waiting for Om, she recognized the drowsy voice of the man seated next to her. She didn’t know him personally, but a piece of his transcript came to her while she waited for her Americano. His initials were AAG, and he was sleeping with his sister-in-law. They met in hotel rooms in the city, but right now the man was talking to his wife, presumably, and holding her hand. Like most people in Hudson, they were better-looking than average and dressed like boutique farmers.