Incite. James Frey

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СКАЧАТЬ than because I was interested.

      Mary waved her hand dismissively. “Eh, I don’t want to talk about them. Tell me about you. Who is Michael Stavros?”

      I took a breath. “Well, I already told you the important stuff. I came to Berkeley to do something more with my life than just be a furniture salesman. But for now I’m a janitor. Classy, right?”

      “Don’t feel bad about that,” she said. “I worked at a burger place until I got my internship. I’ll probably go back there when school starts.”

      “I thought you were on scholarship.”

      “Pays for tuition, but nothing else. My dad has plenty of money, but he wants me to make my contribution, which is a buck sixty-five per hour, fifteen hours a week. But it could be worse. He originally didn’t want me to go to college at all.”

      “You should be a janitor. We make one eighty.”

      “I’d rather flip burgers.”

      “What about your internship? That doesn’t pay?”

      “Nope, but that’s okay, because I don’t really do anything. I make coffee, I take notes in meetings, and I get ogled by men who are divorcing their wives. But I have a desk with a window on the eighteenth floor, and my mom took me on a shopping spree for business clothes. That was fun. You should see me before I change clothes after work. I look like a Republican.”

      “Scandalous,” I said with a laugh. “I could see you as a big-name lawyer in the city.”

      She grimaced. “That’s because you don’t know me very well yet. I should get paid just for having to wear high heels every day. I’m a country girl, born and bred. I hated leaving the ranch and moving here. Give me boots and a rifle and I’m your girl.”

      “I liked that about Pasadena. You can be over the hills and out of the city in ten minutes. Well, scratch that. I don’t like Pasadena. It’s too suburban—is that the word I’m looking for? It’s too bland. Nothing happens there.” I laughed. “The thing I just said that I liked about it was how easy it is to get out of there.”

      “Never been there. Is it close to Disneyland?”

      “About an hour. If you’re still a country girl at heart, how did you ever get into law?”

      “I like to argue,” she said, and laughed.

      John sat down with us and put a foot on the coffee table. He was wearing boots—looked like alligator skin.

      “Mike, answer a question for me.”

      “Sure,” I said. “Anything.”

      “I don’t know Pasadena, but there was something in the paper about it a couple weeks ago. Made me think. There was an apartment fire. A guy had gotten out safely, but he ran back inside. They found his body in a hallway—they speculated that he’d been knocking on all the doors. Now, he wasn’t the manager. Neighbors said he was quiet, and no one really knew him.”

      I nodded. I’d heard about the fire. “So what’s the question?”

      “Why did he run back in? He was safe. The fire department was there.”

      “Do you want details from a Pasadena native? Or just my opinion?”

      “Just your opinion,” John said. “Hypothetical. Let’s say you’re the guy.”

      “I think he was just a good guy. Wanted to help. Got out of his depth.”

      A waitress brought him a new Scotch and water, but he seemed in no hurry to drink it. “You know, the Mormon missionaries came knocking on my door once. They have a saying: ‘It becometh every man who hath been warned to warn his neighbor.’ You sure you don’t want a drink?”

      I shook my head. “No,” I said, and decided to change the subject. “Tell me about that game. What’s that?”

      “Endgame?” John asked, and took a sip.

      “It’s scary shit,” Tommy said.

      Mary squeezed my hand.

      “There’s a lot to know,” John said. “The history of it would take hours to tell. I’ll start with a question—what do you believe about the end of the world?”

      I laughed for a moment, because I didn’t think he was being serious. But I was the only one laughing. “The end of the world? I don’t know. My mom is the churchgoer in our family. A Baptist. I’ve never paid much attention. Raining fire and brimstone, and all the sinners go to hell and the good people go to heaven, I guess? Why’s that important?”

      “You want to know about Endgame, right? Mary, tell us what you know,” John said.

      “What I know? Or what I was taught in catechism?”

      “First what you were taught.”

      She brushed some loose strands of hair out of her face. “I was raised Catholic. The Bible says that Christ will return, and that no one knows the time of his coming. The wicked will grow worse and worse and the Antichrist will come and the entire world will fall away. Finally Christ will come down to purge the wicked and sit in judgment of all people. That’s what I was taught, anyway.”

      I smiled, first at her and then at John. “Are we really sitting in the back of a bar talking about the end of the world? Do you know what I’d be talking about if I was back home? Furniture. And if I went out with my friends—which I never had time to do—we’d talk about baseball. And I hate baseball.”

      “Oh, you’ve just never seen good baseball,” John said with a laugh. “But yeah—the end of the world. It’s is a crazy topic. You’ve got to be a little bit nuts to deal with it all. Tommy, how about you? What do you believe?”

      Tommy rolled his eyes. “I’m Hopi. Everything is different for us.”

      “Yeah,” John said, “but I like to hear it. And it will help Mike understand.”

      “There are, supposedly, nine signs to watch for. The first one is that white men will come. As you can see, that one’s already happened.” Tommy laughed. “There are prophecies about covered wagons and longhorn cattle and telescopes. But it all comes down to the ninth sign. All the others have happened already. We’re currently in the Fourth World, and the ninth prophecy says we’re going to hear a crash in the heavens and see a blue star. The Blue Star Kachina will be revealed and take the faithful to the Fifth World.”

      “So,” I asked, “what happens if you’re not Hopi?”

      He pointed at Mary. “What happens if you’re not Catholic?”

      John took a sip of his drink, looked at me, and said, “What do you think the truth is?”

      “Nuclear holocaust,” I said. “Sooner or later.”

      “And you don’t believe in a god or a kachina or the Rapture or anything like that?”

      “I’m not saying there definitely isn’t СКАЧАТЬ