The Game

a scene from The Wizard of Oz sprung into my head in which the Wizard tells the Tin Man, “A heart is not judged by how much you love, but by how much you are loved by others.”
    I was looking forward to letting my dreams file away all my thoughts, worries, and aggravations so I could start the next day fresh. But I was waylaid by Courtney. She stood in my doorway, a sheaf of papers in her hand.
    “You gotta get Frank Abagnale on the phone for me,” she demanded. “He can fix this. And call Lisa and tell her I need to see her.”
    “You got it.”
    I had no idea what she was talking about. I didn’t know how to get in touch with Frank Abagnale (the counterfeit artist whose memoir inspired the movie Catch Me If You Can ) or, for that matter, Lisa, her guitarist. But by now I’d figured out how to deal with Courtney’s constant demands: Just say yes and do nothing. She’d forget what she wanted in a few hours anyway.
    In the morning, I checked on Mystery. He was sitting on his bed in his robe, shaking and convulsing. His face was red and his eyes were full of tears. I’d never seen him like this before. When he was depressed in Toronto, he’d simply shut down and become catatonic. This time, he seemed to be in real pain.
    Evidently, Katya had come into his bathroom in the morning to get her toothbrush.
    “Do you want to tell me about what happened last night?” Mystery had asked.
    “Why should I? You basically gave me as a present to Herbal.”
    “Did you fuck him?”
    “Well, let’s put it this way,” she had said, “I just had the most amazing sex of my life.”
    It crushed him.
    “I want to kill her.” He rolled onto his back and moaned like a dying dog. “Logically, I know I’m being controlled by my emotions. But my logic is just 2 percent right now. I feel emotionally raw.” He clenched his bedsheet in his fist. “I feel strange and empty, like after a shit.”
    He rolled over and started sobbing again. “I feel shit empty.”
    I would have laughed if he were trying to be funny.
    As he grieved, I kept thinking of one of Courtney’s lyrics: “I made my bed/I’ll lie in it.” Mystery had made his bed. And now Herbal was lying in it.
    He raised his hands to the ceiling and screamed in his Anthony Robbins voice. Suddenly, Courtney poked her head in the door. “Is it about me? I can sleep in the front room if you want.”
    She could be so sweet.
    I walked into the living room and told Courtney what was going on. Katya was sitting on the patio outside, smoking a cigarette.
    “I feel so bad,” Katya said. “Poor Mystery.” She made sympathetic sounds for him— awws and mmms—as if she were talking about her dog.
    Herbal shuffled to the table with his head slumped forward. He was silent, trying to think of something to say. Neither of them seemed to regret sleeping together. They just didn’t realize that Mystery would take it so hard. None of us did.
    Courtney lit a cigarette and told Herbal about a threesome she’d experienced and how sharing can be caring and how she ran away to San Francisco to join Faith No More and how the Suicide Girls was her idea and how she tried to turn a groupie into an artist in Europe. Somewhere in her meandering speech there was a metaphor for Herbal’s current dilemmacaught between his closest friend and the girl he was falling in love with—but we couldn’t find it.
    Just then, Herbal’s phone rang. He answered it and, with a shocked expression on his face, handed it to Courtney.
    “It’s Frank Abagnale calling for you,” he said. “I guess he got my message.”
    I left the three of them on the patio and called Mystery’s sister, Martina.
    “He’s starting to crash again,” I said.
    “How bad is it?”
    “It started off like normal heartbreak, but this morning he went over the edge. The situation seems to have triggered some kind of chemical reaction. He’s crying uncontrollably right now.”
    “Well, if it gets any worse, I’ll get him a ticket back to Toronto. If you can put him on the plane, we’ll take care of him when he arrives.”
    “You realize that if he comes back to Toronto, everything will be lost. He’s overstayed his visa here, so they’ll never let him into the United States again. He’ll have no chance of becoming a famous illusionist. And his pickup business will be destroyed.”
    “I realize that. But what choice do we have?”
    “I’ll try to handle it myself.”
    “Just send him home. Health care in