Royce Mullins and The Case of Virtue's Burn, A Novel: Chapter 14

by Jeff Hart

Paul Fennel was waiting in front of the motel room door when his soul mate and I pulled up, his face flushed the color of brake-lights from forehead to chin. I watched as Paul auditioned a variety of places for his hands — in-pocket, out-of-pocket, thumbs through belt loops — before hiding his overactive digits in a tangle behind his back. Darlene, The Virtue, watched this too, and sighed.

“That’s him, huh?”

“Go to him,” I replied, sagelike. “His soul cries out to yours.”

“Barf,” she said, as she stuffed her wad of chewing gum into my car’s crowded ashtray.

As a lifelong connoisseur of the thrift store acquired suit, I immediately recognized the green-tag bargain Fennel had donned for the occasion. The coat sleeves were too short, or the starched French cuffs too big, or both. The shirt ballooned from pants that found no purchase on Fennel’s narrow hips, creating a floppy belly of polyester. He had a frame better suited to a one-piece pajama. Looking at Fennel, all giddy and spiffed up for the spiritual prom, I suddenly dreaded that Darlene, who’d finished apathetically riding me only hours ago, might actually do what I’d paid her to and explain to Paul that he’d mistaken wily whore tricks for metaphysical connection.

“Be nice to him,” I said, too late, because Darlene was already out of the car and approaching Fennel.

“Ok, weirdo,” she said, her head cocked. “What do you want from me?”

Paul shrank back before her. I could see tendons in his neck clench from the extreme effort of maintaining eye contact. He managed a faltering smile as he opened the door to the motel room.

“Please,” said Fennel, beseechingly. “Not out here. “

Darlene allowed herself to be gently ushered into the room. I got out of my car. Paul scurried over to me, his cuff pulling fully free from his coat sleeve as he extended his sweaty hand. I clasped his limp fingers in mine and, after releasing him, resisted the urge to straighten his suit.

“Thank you, Mr. Mullins,” said Paul, “for bringing her.”

“Had to. I’m the knot, right?”

“That’s right,” chuckled Paul. He reached out again, this time awkwardly patting me on the shoulder, as if I was the one in need of reassurance. “Will you wait out here for me? It won’t be long.”

“Ok, Paul,” I nodded.

Paul pushed his glasses up his flat face and turned from me, disappearing into the motel room.

“Go with God,” I told the closed door.

Of course I eavesdropped. Through the door I could hear only the low murmur of Paul’s voice, his timorous stops and starts punctuated by shrill objections from Darlene, those eventually decreasing in conviction and volume until it was just Paul speaking, steady, under control. I gave up listening.

I lit a cigarette and thought about this time tomorrow, when I planned to be drooling against the cool glass of a Grey Hound window. I figured myself square with God, having paid back the divine intervention of two nights ago by arranging this meeting, regardless of the result. There would be no more psychosomatic back pains, I’d cut the invisible strings that bound me to New York. Eventually, a landlord with a fistful of unread eviction notices would drag my dusty futon from my abandoned office to the curb outside where it’d be carted off by some Tompkins Square squatters.

My New York epitaph: This futon donated by a sometimes not-so ineffectual detective. He disappeared.

Briefly, I thought of Claudette. She’d be cozied up in her brownstone at this hour. The cello prodigy tucked safely away in its room, Claudette snuggled under the arm of the vegan-grocer, sharing a crossword and a glass of free-trade vino. It was an image I’d conjured frequently over the last few years, whenever I needed an excuse to stay in bed or pour another drink or, more often, both. At that moment, visiting that domestic fantasy, I felt nothing. Not a bad kind of nothing, not a sucking emptiness, but a contented apathy. I thought about Ahmet, quietly walking the aisles of his bodega, restocking the ice cream case, and felt the same level of sentiment toward him as I did for Claudette.

Which is to say none.

Darlene flung open the motel room door and stood in front of me. Paul had lasted with her about as long as I had. Her face streaked with tears, Darlene fixed me with a wild-eyed look, equal parts rage and disbelief, as if I’d thrown her into a room with an adorable animal that’d gone feral from its uncontrollable case of puppy love.

“What?” I asked her, bewildered.

“You fuckers,” she replied, and slapped me.

My cheek stung, my ear drum rattled. I’d been slapped before, but always for reasons easily discerned. Before my jaw could work its way around a question, Darlene had turned away. She strode across the parking lot, chin high and shoulders square, laying the defiance on thick, wanting me to know that whatever Paul said hadn’t gotten to her. But I’d seen the look on her face. I knew better.

Paul joined me in front of the motel, rubbing his own cheek. We watched Darlene in silence until she was gone, swallowed up by the shadows of Long Island City.

“So. How’d it go?” I asked.

“About as I expected,” he replied.

Paul tapped my chest, where my cigarette pack was outlined in my shirt pocket.

“Could I try one of those?”

“Sure.”

I lit us cigarettes. Paul watched me before taking his first drag, trying to replicate the way I held my smoke, the way I flicked away loose ash. He surprised me by not coughing.

“What the hell did you say to her?”

Paul’s gaze wandered after the departed Virtue, his lips screwing up around his cigarette.

“I told her that I’d first seen her in one of my visions. That we would meet at the Unfettered Souls and, over time, I’d have worn down her defenses. We’d leave this awful city on a bus and start a quiet, uneventful life somewhere. We would have been happy.”

“Nice line,” I replied.

“Yes,” continued Paul. “Then, I explained how I let her brother die.”

I looked at Paul. He tossed away his cigarette and looked back, his gaze unwavering.

“Her brother, Derek May, I saw his path too. The horrible things he was capable of, that he was already working his way toward. By stopping him, I altered things. I put myself here, with you, instead of with her.”

Absently, Paul itched at the spot on his breastbone where Darlene had burned him. He took off his glasses, slipped them inside his coat, and rubbed his eyes.

“You can’t understand what that’s like, Mr. Mullins. To make a decision, fully aware of the future you’re closing yourself off from. Not a vaguely formed what-if — I’m sure a man like you has plenty of those — but full knowledge of a different life. Would you want to live with those details?”

“No,” I said.

“I wanted to explain to her. To apologize. I knew it wouldn’t make a difference,” he said. “And it didn’t. But I tried anyway.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“You know, Paul, a little part of me had actually started to believe you.”

I ground my cigarette out and rounded on Paul.

“I’ve been having a shitty couple of years here,” I began. “I realize that I have not, of late, been at my best. Probably why, when you came around, I let you suck me into all that predestination talk. Debts to God and so forth. I was glad, you know, to have a purpose. What would your boy Wayne Maker call that?”

“A coping mechanism,” answered Paul.

“Yeah, that.”

“Or maybe transference?” he shrugged. “I never actually read his books.”

“Shut up,” I said. “The point is, you’ve got the same thing going. You’re not a psychic. And that hooker you just made cry? Not your soul mate. You made all that up to deal with whatever scary shit you saw over in jihad territory. You and those other two jarheads — one of them is dead, by the way, so add that to your guilty conscience — you’re living in a fantasy.”

Paul smiled at me, his look filled with that gentle condescension grown only in dogma-rich brains. I grabbed him by the shirtfront and shook him. He didn’t resist. He was so light, it felt like shaking a Polaroid.

“There’s still a guy out there trying to rearrange more than your pattern. You understand that, right? That a sociopath with a Purple Heart and a literary fetish is going to kill you because of this fairy tale you’ve stitched together?”

“I’m aware of the danger, but disagree with your premise.”

“I’m willing to get you out of the city,” I continued, adding, “pro bono.”

Paul shook his head and carefully brushed himself free of my hands.

“I’m afraid that’s not an option, Mr. Mullins.”

“Why not?”

“It’s not his plan.”

“Fuck His plan.”

“Not Capital H,” said Paul, and took a step to the side, away from me. “The lowercase H that’s been hiding in the trunk of your car.”

I spun around in time to see the muzzle flash. The discharge was thunderous, the cannon I’d kept hidden in my office eager to please after so many years of disuse. Yossarian handled the recoil like a professional, his laconic smile undisturbed. He’d shot Paul Fennel in the chest.

The second time I talked to God was when Yossarian had me kneeling on the parking lot of a seedy Long Island City motel.

Jeff Hart lives in Brooklyn. His other writing can be found over at Culture Blues.

Photo by Fabio, from Flickr.