The Book of Air and Shadows

the ogre’s castle to the land of the good fairies.
    And Crosetti was happy for them all, but he did feel somewhat extra now, as if this development had confirmed his instinct that his time in his mother’s home was quite over. Besides, there was no room. Besides, it made him uncomfortable to see Rolly staring out at him from her children’s faces. He packed his things, hired a U-Haul trailer for the family car to pull, and was out by the following evening with, however, a check for ten grand from Mishkin that had arrived that morning in a FedEx envelope. No one insisted that he stay.
    He was unpacking cartons to music in his new shared loft when he felt his phone vibrating in his pocket. He unplugged his earbuds and put the phone to his cheek.
    “Write this down. I have thirty seconds.”
    “Carolyn?”
    “Write this down. Oh, Christ, you have to help me!” And there followed an address and directions to a lakeside house in the Adirondacks. Crosetti pulled out a ballpoint and scribbled the information on the underside of his left forearm.
    “Carolyn, where are you? What the hell is going on?”
    “Just come and don’t dial this number. They’re going to kill-” with the rest of the sentence lost in static.
    Not good, Crosetti thought, a cliché in fact, especially that business with the call cutting out. The film was going to end on a downer note, bittersweet, tracking the hero returning to his work, maybe the hint of a relationship with the kids, life goes on, or maybe even a hint that Rolly is still alive, a teaser: but not this banal…and he actually kept thinking this way for minutes, stacking books on raw pine shelving, before the reality of the call sank in. Sweat popped out on his face and he had to sit down on the dusty, sprung easy chair he’d scavenged off the street. She really is going to drive me crazy, he thought; no, make that past tense. Okay, I’m game, he thought, I’m an international man of mystery too. What do I need? The Smith & Wesson was back at his mother’s house, and no way was he going back there and explain why he needed it, and now that he thought about actually handling the thing again…no, thanks. But he had hiking boots, check. Richard Widmark black seaman’s sweater, check. Ball cap? No, the watch cap, much better, and the Swiss Army knife, and the grenade launcher…no, just kidding, and the trusty black slicker, still with the mud of Old England on it, wallet, keys, oh, binoculars, can’t forget those, and boy, I’m about as ready as I’ll ever be to face God knows how many heavily armed Russian mobsters…
    “Come again?”
    It was Beck, one of the roommates, looking at him from the doorway with a peculiar expression. Beck was a cadaverous being who worked as a sound engineer and wrote reviews of films no one but him had ever seen, or perhaps did not yet exist.
    “I didn’t say anything,” said Crosetti.
    “Yeah, you were talking, loud, like you were pissed off. I thought you had someone in there with you and then I remembered you came in alone.”
    “Oh, then I was talking to myself. I’m having a psychotic break is all.”
    “Fuck, man, join the club. If you need a lobotomy I could start sharpening the screwdriver.”
    “It’s a girl,” Crosetti admitted. “A girl has driven me crazy. She dumped me and now she wants me to rescue her. This is the second time for the dump ’n’ rescue motif.”
    “Whatever. I tend to stick to the gospel according to St. Nelson Algren: never fuck anyone with more problems than you have yourself. Of course,
he
fucked Simone de Beauvoir…”
    “Thank you. I’ll remember that in my next life. Meanwhile, a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. Can I borrow your computer? I need some maps.”

    It took him the usual forty-five minutes to clear the city but on the thruway past the Tappan Zee he made up for lost time. The old Fury had been maintained in perfect trim: inside was a 440-cubic-inch V-8 engine and outside was waxed midnight blue lacquer, plus the various shields and decals that police officers use to identify themselves to other police officers so as to render their cars virtually immune to any ticketing, whether rolling or parked. Crosetti cranked it up to ninety and made it to Albany in a little over two hours. Another ninety miles and seventy minutes got him to Pottersville, where he filled his tank and ate a horrible gas station microwave meal, by which time it was dark and snowing, fat floaters