Freedom [194]
Humid air had arrived in the night, dewing the cars of Georgetown and moistening the off-kilter panels of Georgetown sidewalk. Birds were active in the budding trees; an early-departing jet was crackling across the pale spring sky. Even Katz’s tinnitus seemed muted in the morning hush. This is a good day to die! He tried to remember who had said that. Crazy Horse? Neil Young?
Shouldering his bag, he walked downhill in the direction of sighing traffic and came eventually to a long bridge leading over to the center of American world domination. He stopped near the center of the bridge, looked down at a female jogger on the creek-side path far below, and tried to evaluate, from the intensity of the photonic interaction between her ass and his retinas, how good a day to die it really was. The height was great enough to kill him if he dove, and diving was definitely the way to do it. Be a man, go headfirst. Yes. His dick was saying yes to something now, and this something was certainly not the wideish ass of the retreating jogger.
Had death, in fact, been his dick’s message in sending him to Washington? Had he simply misunderstood its prophecy? He was pretty sure that nobody would miss him much when he was dead. He could free Patty and Walter of the bother of him, free himself of the bother of being a bother. He could go wherever Molly had gone before him, and his father before her. He peered down at the spot where he was likely to land, a much-trampled patch of gravel and bare dirt, and asked himself whether this nondescript bit of land was worthy of killing him. Him the great Richard Katz! Was it worthy?
He laughed at the question and continued across the bridge.
Back in Jersey City, he took arms against the sea of junk in his apartment. Opened the windows to the warm air and did spring cleaning. Washed and dried every dish, threw out bales of useless paper, and manually deleted three thousand pieces of spam from his computer, stopping repeatedly to inhale the marsh and harbor and garbage smells of the warmer months in Jersey City. After dark, he drank a couple of beers and unpacked his banjo and guitars, ascertaining that the torque in the neck of his Strat hadn’t magically fixed itself in its months in its case. He drank a third beer and called the drummer of Walnut Surprise.
“Hello, dickhead,” Tim said. “Good to finally hear from you—not.”
“What can I say,” Katz said.
“How about, ‘I’m really sorry for being a total loser and disappearing on you and telling fifty different lies.’ Dickhead.”
“Yeah, well, regrettably, there was some stuff I had to attend to.”
“Right, being a dickhead is really time-consuming. What the fuck are you even calling me for?”
“Wondered how things are going with you.”
“You mean, apart from you being a total loser and fucking us over in fifty different ways and lying to us constantly?”
Katz smiled. “Maybe you can write out your grievances and present them to me in written form, so we can talk about something else now.”
“I already did that, asshole. Have you checked your e-mail in the last year?”
“Well, just give me a call then, if you feel like it, later. My phone’s operative again.”
“Your phone is operative again! That’s a good one, Richard. How’s your computer? Is that operative again, too?”
“Just saying I’m around if you want to call.”
“And just go fuck yourself is all I’m saying.”
Katz set down his phone feeling good about the conversation. He thought it unlikely that Tim would have bothered abusing him if he had something better than Walnut Surprise in the works. He drank one last beer, ate one of the killer mirtazapines that a script-happy doctor in Berlin had given him, and slept for thirteen hours.
He woke to a blazing hot afternoon and took a walk in his neighborhood, checking out females dressed in this year’s style of skimpy clothes, and bought some