“The Kennebec Fruit. I had a root beer. It was fantastic.”
“Yeah, things taste better there. Less preservatives, or something.”
“You know Frank Anicetti? I met him as a kid of seventeen.”
Somehow, in spite of everything, I expected Al to laugh, but he took it as a matter of course. “Sure. I’ve met Frank many times. But he only meets me once — back then, I mean. For Frank, every time is the first time. He comes in, right? From the Chevron. ‘Titus has got the truck up on the lift,’ he tells his dad. ‘Says it’ll be ready by five.’ I’ve heard that fifty times, at least. Not that I always go into the Fruit when I go back, but when I do, I hear it. Then the ladies come in to pick over the fruit. Mrs. Symonds and her friends. It’s like going to the same movie over and over and over again.”
“Every time is the first time.” I said it slowly, putting a space around each word. Trying to get them to make sense in my mind.
“Right.”
“And every person you meet is meeting you for the first time, no matter how many times you’ve met before.”
“Right.”
“I could go back and have the same conversation with Frank and his dad and they wouldn’t know.”
“Right again. Or you could change something — order a banana split instead of a root beer, say — and the rest of the conversation would go a different way. The only one who seems to suspect something’s off is the Yellow Card Man, and he’s too booze-fucked to know what he’s feeling. If I’m right, that is, and he feels anything. If he does, it’s because he just happens to be sitting near the rabbit-hole. Or whatever it is. Maybe it puts out some kind of energy field. He—”
But he got coughing again and couldn’t go on. Watching him doubled over, holding his side and trying not to show me how bad it hurt — how it was tearing him up inside — was painful itself. He can’t go on this way, I thought. He’s no more than a week from the hospital, and probably just days. And wasn’t that why he’d called me? Because he had to pass on this amazing secret to somebody before the cancer shut his lips forever?