She spies the coat in his hand. “You were going out?”
“No. I mean, yes. But no.” Good god. She looks confused, and he can hardly blame her. “I was just going for a walk. What do you need?”
“Look, you probably won’t love this idea, but how would you feel about coming to the Riverview with me?”
“What’s the Riverview?”
“Another nightclub?” Nomi winces. “I know, you’re probably allergic to nightclubs now. But this isn’t really a club, it’s more of a hangout, and I need to talk to someone there.”
“A bartender again?”
“A drug dealer.” She tries to sweeten the deal. “You don’t have to dress up. But we have to go now, because Mischa doesn’t stick around past midnight.”
He agrees to accompany her, purely on the reasoning that going to the Riverview can’t be worse than staying at home on his own.
Out on the sidewalk, the district nightlife has bloomed into full flower. Nomi greets the two Latine sex workers on the corner as she ushers him into a left turn at Washington and continues explaining her plans for the evening. “Ricki was delivering drugs to Solange and this Jeremy guy, right? So I’m thinking, who’s become the supplier since Ricki died? That’s what I’m hoping Mischa or someone else will know.”
“Presumably Lamonte has more than one gofer,” Simon suggests.
“Or he could be hiring. Either way, someone’s got to be delivering those drugs. Who are they, and where are they picking up their supply?” She stomps along awhile before glancing his way. “Listen—I read your journals.”
“Ah.” Simon tries to make the momentary wobble in his gait seem natural.
“The first one was a little rambling.”
He keeps his voice bland. “That was my first year of recovery, so my brain was very fuzzy.”
Everythingwas fuzzy. His head hurt constantly. His eyes hurt. He was in a continuous state of low-level misery and anxiety: losing time, losing faces and names, things swimming back, then disappearing again. His thoughts and emotions floated in a haze of medication, like they’d been muffled in layers of spiderweb.
“It did have a kind of Hunter S. Thompson vibe.” Nomi glances at him to see if he understands the reference. “It was very stream of consciousness.”
“As in, information streaming in and out of my consciousness in no coherent order.” He can be dry about it, but it’s still stressful to remember.
Nomi waits for a car to pass as they cross Horatio Street. “Things got better your second year. But you still had a few ... episodes.”
He snorts. “That’s a very diplomatic way of putting it. Do you mean the convulsions, or—”
“You piled all the stuff together in your room and tried to set it on fire.” Nomi ticks things off the list. “You continued to see people and objects that weren’t there. You tried to strangle a man who came to Flores’s clinic. Isolated incidents. Most of the time you were normal. But every now and again, it would be like your electric circuits malfunctioned.”
“That’s basically what a brain is—a bunch of electric circuits. And mine were glued back together in some kind of random order.” A cab goes by with a length of tinsel dangling from the radio antenna. Simon hates feeling like he’s justifying himself, but he wants to give her some context, although she should know this from the journals. “Things have leveled out year on year since then. Flores used to say it would take time, and he was right.”
They’re approaching Moore’s Wholesale Meats, and a number of people on Jane Street are wearing fancy outfits, walking toward the hotel.There’s a strong smell of exhaust and also a whiff of pot. The evening temperature is dropping; Simon realizes he forgot to bring a scarf.
Nomi’s dark eyes dart toward him, all the metal in her ears glinting in the night. “But you still don’t really know what your normal state looks like.”
“Sure.” He thinks he should probably just say this without thinking too much about it. “I mean, maybe I’m not malfunctioning. Maybe I was just a really messed-up person in my old life, and now when I get, uh, dysregulated, I’m working as the manufacturer intended.”
Nomi, her black beanie jammed down, doesn’t answer at first. Then she stops in the street and sighs. “Simon, I’ve run your prints.”
That brings him to a dead halt. “What? Wait, where did you get my fingerprints?” It comes to him, then. “The coffee mug.”
“Yeah,” she admits. “The coffee mug from the time you slept in my living room.”
That was days ago, well before the incident at Big Mouth. Has she been holding onto his prints since then, like some kind of insurance policy? He feels ripped off. “We talked about this. I said I wanted to stay under the radar—”
“And you’re still under the radar,” Nomi reassures. Her breath is warm enough—and tonight’s air is sufficiently cold—to create small clouds when she speaks. “I told my ex-partner that I found fingerprints at a scene and I’m trying to eliminate scene contamination. The channels I use, nobody is going to do follow-up checks or pass information along to immigration. Listen, you want to find out, right? And after Tuesday night ... I kind of want to find out.”
That stings. He’s stung. He thought things were okay between them. He looks away down the street. “So if my fingerprints get a hit, it means I’m on some police database?”
