«What?»
«Are you here under false pretenses?»
«What are you … ?» John was adrenalized.
«Let me see your driver's license.»
He pulled out his driver's license, just one month old, and handed it to Dreama. She looked at it, handed it back to him and said, «Sorry. I had to see if that was your real name — if this was a hoax of some sort. You're a 1,037, John Lodge Johnson. Do you know what that means?»
«No. You tell me .»
«You're a four-digit prime number. Most numerologists go their entire lives without encountering a four-digit prime.»
Dreama grilled John, asked what he did for a living and took a distinctly arch manner with him. Ryan then asked to have his number done. It was 11.
«Eleven?»
«Sounds like you're set for a career in the dynamic and fast-growing world of fast food, Ryan,» said Vanessa.
«Eleven?» Ryan was crestfallen.
«Eleven is a perfectly good number,» Dreama assured him.
«I hear 11s are really loyal,» said John.
John paid Dreama, who gave them a sheet describing their prime number's characteristics. Dreama became fidgety and scuttled the three out of her apartment.
Back in the car, John said, «Well, that was a fucking waste of time.»
Vanessa's phone bleeped and she answered it. «It's my brother,» she told the other two. She finished the call and pressedEND . «Randy is in a minivan headed this way.»
«Do you have your GPT?» asked Ryan.
«What's that?» asked John.
«My global positioning transmitter. It's the everyday equivalent of the black box they use behind the cockpit in jetliners. I keep it sewed into the hem of my purse.» She yanked a small black rectangle from her bag, smaller than a TV remote control. «A satellite can track me down at any place on earth plus or minus a freckle.»
«You're giving it to me ?»
«For a 1,037 you can be awfully dim. When young Randall's Ford Aerostar van pulls up in» — she looked at her wristwatch — «under two minutes, you are going to have to stick this onto the car without being seen. And as we seem to be fresh out of duct tape, what exactly will be your brainy plan to attach it to the vehicle, John?»
John shut his eyes to concentrate. «A man, a plan, a canal — I was born in Panama, you know.»
«Oh, shut up.»
«Juicy Fruit.» He wrenched open the glove compartment and from it threw packs of unopened gum to Ryan and Vanessa, taking several for himself.
Randy's van swung into a spot directly in front of Dreama's building and across from their car. The three watched Randy walk to the building's main door, buzz and head to the elevator.
John gently opened the side passenger door and crawled behind the car. He roadrunnered across the street and fastened the GPT to the inside of the rear bumper with a cooling glob of his gum. The dogs, sensing John beneath them, grew frenzied, scratching at the windows and barking. Just then the apartment's door opened, and Randy and Dreama came out with her luggage. Both looked worried. There was nowhere for John to hide except underneath the van, where he quickly rolled, listening to the doors above him open and shut. Randy shouted at the dogs to sit. Finally, John heard the engine ignite and watched the van drive away, leaving him facing the sky where he saw the lights of jets preparing to land at LAX sweep in from the distance.
Chapter Twenty-seven
In Erie, Pennsylvania, three weeks after Susan's arrival at Randy Montarelli's house, she floated down the stairs, her nightgown trailing. «Christ, Randy, my nipples feel like hand grenades. What are you doing up at» — Susan looked at the clock on the top right-hand corner of Randy's Mac — «four twenty-sevenA .M.?» Upstairs, Baby Eugene, three weeks old, screamed for milk.
«Oh, you know, no rest for the wicked.»
«Are we out of pineapple juice again?»
«We are.»
«Right. Do we have any Goldfish crackers left?»
«Cupboard above the toaster.»
«Good.» Susan foraged about. «What lies are you cooking up tonight?»
«You just gave me a good idea. Here, let me try it out.» Randy read aloud the words he'd just typed into an Internet chat room:
That's not what I heard from my friend who does the makeup on the Friends set. *He* told me that Jennifer Aniston delayed taping for three days because she had nipple fatigue.
«Know what it reminds me of?» Susan asked, running her finger around the rim of a peanut butter jar. «Last month, when you started the rumor that Keanu Reeves has ‘reverse flesh eating disease.' »
«That was a classic, wasn't it?»
«It's like your brain doesn't know what image to conjure up.» Susan tasted the peanut butter and found it delicious.
«That's the coolest kind of rumor,» said Randy. «Like the one I did about Helen Hunt — having the operation to remove the remains of a vestigial beaver tail from the base of her spine.»
«Yet another classic.» Susan cradled a box of Ritzes and some apples in her arms. She kissed Randy's forehead, sprinkled crumbs onto his keyboard, then gallumphed upstairs.
Randy was a rumormonger. Before the 1990s he thought of himself as a gossip, but more tellingly he considered himself a zero, some sort of alien love child abandoned on an Erie, Pennsylvania, tract house doorstep where he grew up clumsy and socially inept. Randy was 30 percent over the national recommended body weight for his height, and possessed a sensibility so totally not of Erie that he was unable to be even the class clown or a bumbling mascot to the cruel and good-looking girls. The only friends he ever attempted to make were the brassy, cynical girls with whom he dissected Mademoiselle and who seemed to have affairs only with married men — girls who bolted from Erie the moment they graduated high school.
Checking out of Erie was an act Randy hadn't been able to do himself. It was a case of the devil he knew versus the devil he didn't. As a teenager, he had first seen the devil he didn't want to know in a 1982 TV news documentary. The devil was on-screen for perhaps fifteen seconds, but that's all it took.
The devil still burned in his mind fifteen years later, in the form of a diseased gay clone, emaciated and mustached, wasting away as he guarded the gates of hell. He made bony come-hither disco dance hip sways, and his skin was pitted with prune-tinted Kaposi's sarcoma lesions. His eyes had become white jelly from a cytomegalovirus infection.
In Randy's mind, somewhere around 1985, the image of the sick man acquired chaps and a cowboy hat. Around 1988, each time Randy thought of the sick man, the man began to wink back at Randy with dead white eyes. If the cowboy signified adulthood, then Randy wanted nothing to do with it. If that was the image that stood for sex, then Randy was going to be a monk. And so he hadn't left Erie, which, whatever else it didn't have going for it, was also seemingly lacking in people with AIDS.
But then over the years he began to see the devil everywhere he went. On a trip one night in 1988 he kissed a trucker at a stop outside of Altoona. He shut down emotionally and spent the next five years waiting to die. When he didn't, he decided he was going to live, but his was to be a life without love or affection save for that which came from his two spindly café-aulait Afghan hounds, Camper and Willy. He'd bought them as puppies from the trunk of a 1984 LeBaron parked outside a Liz Claiborne factory outlet. Its driver was a hippie girl who said the puppies would be drowned that afternoon unless they found homes, because God had summoned her to Long Island where she was to cornrow the hair of teenagers as well as monitor the sunrise.
As he aged and lost his hair and wrinkled, Randy figured he deserved no love or affection because he hadn't been brave or suffered or fought a good fight across the years. The newer, younger, more beautiful children arrived, and with annoying ease inherited the rubble of the sexual revolution, plus the freedom and the easy knowledge of love, death, sex and risk. Randy extracted his revenge on the world for poisoning both his coming-of-age and his youth, through the creation of lies and rumors. Locked inside his Erie town house at night, numbed by his day job doing payroll for a roofing company, he fed thousands of deceptions into a Dell PC which multiplied them like viruses, out into the world of electrons. Most of his rumors died, but some became self-fulfilling prophecies. Who could have known that young ingenue truly was so ripe to become a compulsive handwasher?