Rage Is Back (9781101606179) Read Online Free Page A

us is crazy.”
    I looked at my phone again, and goddamn if it wasn’t the next day, and I wasn’t twenty-four hours and fifteen minutes late. I had eight missed calls, too. Three from my boss, five from Karen.
    Whatever was happening, I wasn’t going to recruit Patrick to help me figure it out. “Wow,” I said, “I’m really sorry—I guess my phone is on the fritz. I just got the message an hour ago.” I ran a hand over my dome. “You still need?”
    Patrick stared a second, then nodded. “Yeah, sure. Come in.”
    I sold him his weed, and Patrick flipped the script and offered me a rip from the glass bong he kept on his coffeetable. Swear to God, if I ever get to be his age and pot paraphernalia is occupying a place of honor in my living room, punch me in the throat.
    I had no desire to get further stoned, but there was the matter of precedent to consider, so I obliged. Ben Franklin or Hitler or somebody once said something to the effect of “if you want a man to like you, don’t do him a favor, ask him to do you one.” And by the same token, I guess being a deranged, incompetent asshole had endeared me to Patrick.
    I thanked him, hustled down the stairs, and checked my phone in the lobby. Still Tuesday. I turned around and started trudging back up, holding the cell in front of me like a compass. I’ll say it again: fourteen flights is a lot of stairs. The moment I stepped across the top floor’s threshold, my digital display flipped from
Tuesday, 5:50 PM
to
Wednesday, 5:50 PM,
and I threw up on Patrick’s doormat.
    Karen was livid when I got home. She’d called the hospitals, the morgue, even the police—and in our family, you don’t involve the cops in anything, for anything. Before I got to Whoopty Whoo Ivy League We’s A Comin’ Academy and started kicking it with rich kids, I never even realized you
could
call the police, unless you were calling them
on
somebody.
    There weren’t a lot of plausible places I could have disappeared to for forty-eight hours without answering my phone, and me and Karen were on decent terms then—as close to trusting one another as we’d been since the cataclysmic autumn of 2000, when we’d sort of crossed paths on the road to adulthood, traveling in opposite directions with knives to our backs. If we had put that year behind us, it was by centimeters. Karen still kept her hospital bracelet on her nightstand. I never unlocked the door of our apartment without steeling myself to find my mother gone, and a neighbor I barely knew waiting for me in the living room.
    So I told her the truth, which she did not for one second believe. I asked her when I’d ever lied, and offered to take her to the building right then and prove it, and Karen sucked her teeth and said she couldn’t force me to tell her where I’d been, but if I was going to start pulling vanishing acts and talking crazy like my father, then I could go sleep on Dengue’s floor like he had, or take my weak shit to 79th and Madison and see what kind of reception I got from the Uptown Girl’s legendary parents, and was that clear?
    It was. I went to my room, passed out, never brought it up again. That didn’t stop Karen from treating me for the next month like the guy in the zombie movie who says he hasn’t been infected, but he’s lying. As if I might turn into Billy at any second, and she was going to pump me full of buckshot at the first clear sign.
    That was a year ago. I hadn’t come back to this building until Karen tossed me, but since then? Shit, I’d hoofed the stairs seven or eight times, skipped ten percent of my days. Gained nothing, and learned less. Wherever you go, there you are. It was an addiction without a high, just one more stupid thing I watched myself do again and again. You ever fast-forward through a movie, trying to skip past the boring parts or find some tits, and