Tip of the Iceberg
From this vantage point (over the din of Mad Mike’s demolition) I can hear what I almost heard when we were signing all those papers: Carlos admonishing me: Don’t blow this. We’re talking a chain of bakeries. Carlos practically jiggled his fist in an abbreviated thumb’s up, ye-es-sss.
[This post is an excerpt from Diary of a Heretic, the novel. Click here to read the first episode, or here to read the previous one.]
In any case, once it was clear I was more afraid of offending Shari Murtaugh than of losing everything I had, Carlos and company knew the deal was sealed. No matter how many more signatures were needed, no matter how high the closing costs, what the interest rates or points. Shari Murtaugh was assured I wasn’t fraudulent—I’d passed the bleeding holy card test—and I had demonstrated that hurting a fetishist’s feelings bothered me more than paying half a million dollars for a dress shop.
Outside, we all shook hands. Matt and Shari and Sylvia got into a black Cadillac. Off, they said, to celebrate. Fletcher and Franklin waved ta-ta, lumbering off to their gym. Carlos and I looked around. The empty street was ours. His warm, sinewy arm around my shoulders, he pulled punches to my chin and chest, and said, “You did it! Cosmic opportunity hovered just out of reach but you rose to meet it.”
And suddenly, Carlos’s breath felt soft and warm in my ear. “Of course, the main thing, the exciting thing, is the spiritual aspect. The spiritual street is wide open. It’s boundless territory.” He pulled me over to the nail salon and pressed me up against the entrance. A canvas awning covered our heads. He ran his hands up and down my anorak. He took my face in his hands and electricity fused us together. We stood in a column of light. There was a rush, a beating of wings—and then a jolt—What was I doing? What had just happened?
After weeks of awkwardness, Carlos and I stood wrapped in an ecstatic embrace in the doorway of Sylvia’s Custom Nail Wraps. We shook ourselves simultaneously and began to speak simultaneously. “Did you—” “Are you—” We laughed. We wiped our eyes. We gazed at one another.
And following long, drifting seconds, Carlos whispered, “This is just the beginning¸ Malcolm.”
To which I added, “The tip of the tip of the iceberg.”
(Click here to read the next episode.)
