glass of bottled water, sitting out on the deck,
going back in to check the mail every fi fteen minutes. It was very
late. I knew there was little chance that a reply, were it ever to be
forthcoming, was going to arrive tonight. But however different they
may be in reality, we carry into e-mail conversations a vestige of the
expectations implicit in the more old-fashioned kind. We think that if
we say something, then the other guy will say something right back.
She (or he) did not.
At three o’clock I locked the doors and turned the computer off.
As I undressed I realized that, however it might feel during the day,
the year was turning. The room felt cold.
I got into a bed that seemed very wide and lay listening to the
blood in my ears, and trying to remember nothing, until I was no
longer myself.
46 Michael Marshall
No reply at dawn, nor by midmorning, nor four-thirty, when I changed
into my work clothes and set off for the restaurant. There had been
a lot of rain in the night, and on my early morning walk the sand
had been dull and pockmarked, the beach strewn with seaweed. As I
walked up the road toward the Pelican it seemed likely the same was
going to happen again tonight. A couple of hours from now it would
be raining with the sullen persistence for which Oregon is justly cel-
ebrated, which meant a quiet night in the restaurant. It was likely to
have been anyhow, and John wouldn’t be staying open on Sunday
evenings much longer. The season was done.
As I walked, I talked myself down. The e-mail was likely just the
work of an opportunistic lunatic who worked on a slow news cycle. If
there had been anything meaningful behind it, I believed the sender
would have been in touch again quickly. What do you do if you’ve
sent an e-mail like that, and it’s real? You expect a reply, and then you
get on the case quickly. Once the mark is hooked you don’t give them
the chance to wriggle off again.
So I was back to the idea that it never meant anything in the fi rst
place. I worked the sequence back and forth in my head for about ten
minutes, and kept coming to the same conclusion. I tried to make it
stick, and move on.
Two miles is enough to get a lot of thinking done. It’s also enough
to work out that you’re not in the best of moods. I was one of the
fi rst to get to the restaurant, however, so I got busy helping set up.
Eduardo walked by outside the window at one stage, saw me, and held
up his pack of Marlboro. I went out back to have a smoke with him
and two of the other cooks—which was pleasant enough but also kind
of weird to do after all this time, as if I’d slipped into a parallel but
not-very-different existence. Eduardo’s English was decent but the
others’ wasn’t, and my Spanish is lousy. The experience boiled down
to: so, here we all are, smoking, in an atmosphere of vague goodwill.
As I headed inside I was surprised, and yet also not surprised,
to see Becki’s car entering the lot. Kyle got out, putting his arrival
B A D T H I N G S 47
a good forty minutes ahead of ser vice. I watched him head into the
restaurant, and glanced across at Becki in the driver’s seat of the car.
She gave me a smile and I realized things were going to be okay
with her after all. Also that I’d probably seen the end of my nascent
pizza-making career, at least for now.
We got a reasonable sitting for the early-bird slot, but after that it
went real slow until there was just one family left at a table in the
middle of the room, eating in a silence so murderous it almost seemed
to drown out the music playing in the background. Ted sent Mazy
home after an hour. The rest of the staff fl oated like abandoned sail-
boats on calm seas, hands clasped behind their backs, coming to rest
in corners of the restaurant to stand and watch as the sky grew lower
and heavier and more purple outside.
“Gonna be a big one,” said a voice. “Like, kaboom .”
I turned to see
going back in to check the mail every fi fteen minutes. It was very
late. I knew there was little chance that a reply, were it ever to be
forthcoming, was going to arrive tonight. But however different they
may be in reality, we carry into e-mail conversations a vestige of the
expectations implicit in the more old-fashioned kind. We think that if
we say something, then the other guy will say something right back.
She (or he) did not.
At three o’clock I locked the doors and turned the computer off.
As I undressed I realized that, however it might feel during the day,
the year was turning. The room felt cold.
I got into a bed that seemed very wide and lay listening to the
blood in my ears, and trying to remember nothing, until I was no
longer myself.
46 Michael Marshall
No reply at dawn, nor by midmorning, nor four-thirty, when I changed
into my work clothes and set off for the restaurant. There had been
a lot of rain in the night, and on my early morning walk the sand
had been dull and pockmarked, the beach strewn with seaweed. As I
walked up the road toward the Pelican it seemed likely the same was
going to happen again tonight. A couple of hours from now it would
be raining with the sullen persistence for which Oregon is justly cel-
ebrated, which meant a quiet night in the restaurant. It was likely to
have been anyhow, and John wouldn’t be staying open on Sunday
evenings much longer. The season was done.
As I walked, I talked myself down. The e-mail was likely just the
work of an opportunistic lunatic who worked on a slow news cycle. If
there had been anything meaningful behind it, I believed the sender
would have been in touch again quickly. What do you do if you’ve
sent an e-mail like that, and it’s real? You expect a reply, and then you
get on the case quickly. Once the mark is hooked you don’t give them
the chance to wriggle off again.
So I was back to the idea that it never meant anything in the fi rst
place. I worked the sequence back and forth in my head for about ten
minutes, and kept coming to the same conclusion. I tried to make it
stick, and move on.
Two miles is enough to get a lot of thinking done. It’s also enough
to work out that you’re not in the best of moods. I was one of the
fi rst to get to the restaurant, however, so I got busy helping set up.
Eduardo walked by outside the window at one stage, saw me, and held
up his pack of Marlboro. I went out back to have a smoke with him
and two of the other cooks—which was pleasant enough but also kind
of weird to do after all this time, as if I’d slipped into a parallel but
not-very-different existence. Eduardo’s English was decent but the
others’ wasn’t, and my Spanish is lousy. The experience boiled down
to: so, here we all are, smoking, in an atmosphere of vague goodwill.
As I headed inside I was surprised, and yet also not surprised,
to see Becki’s car entering the lot. Kyle got out, putting his arrival
B A D T H I N G S 47
a good forty minutes ahead of ser vice. I watched him head into the
restaurant, and glanced across at Becki in the driver’s seat of the car.
She gave me a smile and I realized things were going to be okay
with her after all. Also that I’d probably seen the end of my nascent
pizza-making career, at least for now.
We got a reasonable sitting for the early-bird slot, but after that it
went real slow until there was just one family left at a table in the
middle of the room, eating in a silence so murderous it almost seemed
to drown out the music playing in the background. Ted sent Mazy
home after an hour. The rest of the staff fl oated like abandoned sail-
boats on calm seas, hands clasped behind their backs, coming to rest
in corners of the restaurant to stand and watch as the sky grew lower
and heavier and more purple outside.
“Gonna be a big one,” said a voice. “Like, kaboom .”
I turned to see
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