Rattlesnake

The reservation is a standing one. Seven o’clock every Thursday. He meets Grace and Brian and Lucinda and Terry and Matt and Matt and Michael. They have their usual table. Grace doesn’t eat. They don’t talk about Grace not eating. She misses when they could smoke indoors. Grace has never smoked in a restaurant. It was outlawed before she was old enough to partake. That doesn’t matter. She knows people used to be able to do it, and she misses when that was the case. When it was possible. The reservation is under his name.

Archie Norris.

It’s not his real name.

The other standing reservation begins at one am. It is not sharp. Sometimes it’s at one fifteen. It’s whenever Grant decides to show up.

Grant is not his real name.

At the table, bread is offered, but rarely consumed. The Matt’s bicker over which is more liberal. Archie puts them both to shame by offering up a sacrificial lamb. Some politician or artist who up until then had seemed unassailable. Archie will announce that he’s working on what is ostensibly a hit piece about them. Twenty-something pages in the New Yorker that will ruin them. The table ooh’s and aah’s. Archie is their north star. As he goes, so go they, but they’re not above a light challenge from time to time, and neither is he. He thinks it keeps him on his toes. Besides, none of them ever win when they take him to task, but he’s learned how to put them down politely. Mercifully. He pats their hands as he watches the poison of his arguments slowly kill them.

Grant gags him if he’s lucky. If he’s not lucky, Grant makes him say things. He resents it, but it’s what he pays for. Grant asks him questions he doesn’t have answers to. Why isn't he better at kissing? How can a man in his late thirties be so terrible at kissing? Archie never knew he was a bad kisser until Grant told him so. Now, it’s all he can think about even when he has no intention of kissing anyone. He’s become aware of his tongue. What a horrible thing to have in the human body. A tongue. He’d cut it out if he could, but then he wouldn’t be able to speak, and at seven o’clock on Thursdays, he’s expected to speak, at length. He reads the galleys of new books, and reports back to the table that, Yes, Marratta has done it again. Another Booker on the way or Ever since Vichner went with this new editor, his stuff is unreadable. It’s adjective hash. It’s sewage prose.

The table laughs. Lucinda used to date Vichner so she laughs the loudest. She doesn’t want to give the appearance of bias. She wants everyone, but especially Archie, to know that she’s happy to laugh at how pathetic the man she used to love is now. How his career has cratered. How she’s fine with Archie destroying someone who used to be a friend. Knowing that he’ll probably do the same to her when her story collection comes out in the spring. When that happens, she’ll no longer receive an invitation to these salons. No one has a permanent seat except Archie. That’s always how it’s been.

Grant is the fourth man in so many years to come by and tie Archie up. The first one decided that this sort of thing wasn’t for him. He joined the marines and they never spoke again. The second one ended up being a little too into the whole endeavor, and Archie made up some story about getting engaged and needing to stop these nighttime trysts. The third overdosed. Luckily, he wasn’t with Archie when it happened, but Archie used his death as the inspiration for a short story that appeared in The Atlantic and went on to win an O. Henry award. Overdoses were very in at one time, but now, environmental catastrophe was what would win you accolades. Archie had to do a few more takedowns, and then he was going to return to fiction. Long fiction. Five hundred pages or more. He’d write about a rich family refusing to acknowledge that their beloved beach house was going to be pulled into the sea. There would be symbolism. Skeletons in the closet. Perhaps an illegitimate child. Climate change would stay put in the background, because a novel where climate change was front and center would be utterly depressing. It might win a National Book Award, but nobody was going to read it. Archie voiced all this to the tablea, and the table agreed.

It was miraculous how much spit Grant could produce. He could pretty much cover the top half of Archie’s body in it. Just spitting and spitting and spitting and never taking so much as a sip of water in between. When they were done with the spit, Grant would take the silicone gel Archie special-ordered from Milan and rub it on his legs as he lay strapped to his bed like a patient in danger of having a seizure. Once half his body was drench in organic matter and the lower half felt like he was some sort of pupae, Grant would begin the recitations.

They could be anything from a slightly demeaning affirmation (“I’m a fake.”) to something more detrimental (“My friends all want to see me fail.”) to simple words that, when repeated, took on a sinister taste in Archie’s mouth (“Rattlesnake”). What was it about “Rattlesnake?” It was like some kind of memory recall. A hypnosis. The men before Grant knew about physical pain, but Grant seemed fairly disinterested in that. Oh sure, he’d slap or choke Archie if Archie begged for it, but what he really seemed to love was playing around in the parts of Archie’s mind that were off-limits to everyone else. His long-buried, for lack of a better word, triggers.

Brian talks about a podcast he’s been asked to appear on. Archie cracks a joke about podcasts thinking they’re the new Merv Griffin when really they’re the new Jerry Springer. The table laughs. The laughter hits Archie’s right ear in an unusual way. It sounds almost like a rattle. As Terry, who has patiently waited his turn to speak, begins to rant about the art critic from the Times, Archie begins to imagine Grant placing a snake on his chest later. He picks up a glass of water and nearly spills it, which he would have blamed on Terry’s high-pitched whining. It would throw anyone off. Instead, the water goes down his throat and tastes like spit. He swallows it anyway. Matt will talk next and then Matt and then Grace will say the food was delicious even though she ate none of it.

Archie fantasizes about the rattlesnake raising its tail. He can’t move. He’s still restrained. The gag is back in his mouth. He can’t even ask why this is happening. Grant is standing over him asking him to repeat words he can’t say. He wants the gag removed. He wants it all to end. Michael asks if anyone wants to split a dessert. The check comes. They all take out their cards, but Archie tells them to put it away. He’ll pay for them. He’ll pay for the uneaten food and bottles of wine and the depression and the jealousy and the laughter. The laughter that he can’t afford even with his latest advance. Even with his second book being optioned. Even if he could do a hit piece about every saint on earth.

The rattlesnake is on his chest.

If he could speak, he’d ask it to stay.