The Good Luck of Right Now(44)

Max was taken to an office and introduced to a man wearing “a white f*cking lab coat” who inquired about the possibility of asking Max questions and “digital-f*cking-recording” his answers, as the lab coat turned on the camera stationed on a “f*cking tripod.”

Max asked when he would be able to see the promised cat, and the doctor said that would be “the f*cking dessert.”

They asked Max all sorts of seemingly random questions, most of which he refused to answer because they were “way too f*cking personal.” Max said they asked him whether he had had sex with any men or women recently, and Max said, “Fucking whoa! That’s a line crosser! What the f*ck, hey?” And they didn’t seem to mind that he hadn’t answered the questions, which was “f*cking weird” because they kept telling Max that he was doing fine, even though he was just getting mad and refusing to answer and sweating in his chair. “I don’t f*cking like this. Where the f*ck is the cat?” Max kept asking, and they kept promising Max that he was very close to the part where he got to pet the cat. Max said they asked him even stranger questions next, like did he ever have “suicidal f*cking thoughts,” “extreme f*cking reactions to criticism,” “vivid f*cking dreams,” and “did he really believe in f*cking aliens,” which freaked him out because of what happened to his sister. The doctor said he was particularly interested in Max’s belief that his cat Alice had been telepathic.

Max ordered another two beers, because he had finished his second.

I had only managed to drink half of mine, so I soon had two and a half pints of Guinness lined up on my side of the table.

“What happened to your sister?” I asked.

Just the mention of The Girlbrarian made my mouth dry—it felt like someone had poured hot sand down my throat.

“I’m not at that f*cking part of the story yet. Fuck!” Max yelled. He then said they took him to the end of a “long f*cking hallway” that had no windows or doors or anything at all—just white walls, ceilings, and lights overhead. At the end of the hall was a “weird f*cking box” on the wall. The doctor touched the box with the tip of his right index finger, the box started to glow green, and then a voice said, “Recognized. Door opening. Hello, Dr. Biddington,” as the door automatically unlocked and slid with a hissing noise, as if the inside atmosphere “were pressure f*cking controlled, like a f*cking airplane or a subma-f*cking-rine.” The doctor walked in. Arnie and Max followed. Inside there were no windows and no clocks and “no f*cking TV.” Everything was white—the chairs, the rugs, walls, the counters, “every-f*cking-thing!” There were black balls in the ceilings of each room, and when Max asked about them, he was told there were cameras inside.

“Meow!” Max heard, and a medium-sized “short-f*cking-haired calico” appeared and began to purr and rub up against Max’s leg. The doctor said Max could name the cat “whatever the f*ck he wanted” and she looked “a-f*cking-lot like Alice—too f*cking much like Alice!” She even had a black patch of “f*cking fur” around her “f*cking eye!” Max began to worry that they’d cloned his “dead f*cking cat,” which made him “sweat f*cking buckets” because “what type of mind-f*ckers go around cloning people’s dead f*cking cats? What the f*ck, hey?” Then he began to worry that maybe he was on a spaceship, because the insides of spaceships are always “all f*cking white.” And the long hallway seemed like a “f*cking entrance ramp,” like “getting onto a f*cking airplane.” And if he were on a spaceship, he feared that Arnie and Dr. Biddington were not human—but aliens.

Max asked what they wanted, why had they brought him to this place.

The doctor said, “How would you like to live here with the cat for a few weeks—say . . . three weeks?”

Max said he “would f*cking not!”

And then Arnie started to sweet-talk him, saying that they would pay him ten times the money he would make in an entire year working at “the f*cking movies” and that he could keep the cat at the end and they would give him complimentary pills that would help ease his “f*cking anxiety” and the food would be “gour-f*cking-met” and all he had to do was stay in the room for twenty-one days with the cat, but without coming out or having any contact with the rest of “the f*cking world.”

“We would observe you,” Arnie had said. “And ask you questions from time to time. But that’s it. You wouldn’t have to do a thing, except play with the cat.”

I was amazed, and wondered if Max’s story could possibly be true.

I said, “So they just wanted you to be in the room with the cat?”

“What the f*ck, hey?” Max said, nodding, his eyes open wide. “Fucking weird, right?”

“Why would they pay you to play with a cat for three weeks?”

“I don’t f*cking know. But suddenly, while I was standing there f*cking frozen, with the f*cking clone of Alice purring at my f*cking feet, I realized that the room was definitely a space-f*cking-craft. Math. That’s what I used to figure it out. Fucking math.”

“Math?” I said.

“What the f*ck, hey?” Max said, nodding confidently. “Three weeks was just enough time to travel to a different f*cking galaxy if they put the craft in hyper-f*cking-warp speed.”