The Glimpse Trade (A Silas Sharp Metaphysical Mystery): Chapter 25

 

CHAPTER 25 – Save The Date

 

“We all have days, Mr. Sharp,” said The Archivist. This time it was he who stood in my doorway. He looked a like a door-to-door salesman making unsolicited house calls.

“Is that so?” I didn’t invite him in but he entered anyway.

“Oh, yes.” He remained standing, clutching a briefcase in his right hand. “Everyone has a day they know is coming that they would like to preview. Just a glimpse to see how it is intended to play out. With that valuable information, they can rehearse. Plan. Adjust. Reject.”

“That’s not healthy,” I said, lighting up a cigarette. “Tampering with someone’s life.”

“I don’t tamper,” he said. “I model.”

“That’s a comforting distinction when you don’t have a skin in the game.”

He put his briefcase in the chair across from my desk with the calm of a man who’d already rehearsed my entrance. Maybe he had. Maybe he didn’t need the service anymore because he’d become its purest expression: a person who no longer experienced the present as an event, only as confirmation.

“You’ve come farther than most do,” he said.

“Toward what?”

“Honesty.”

I laughed. “That’s rich, coming from a man who sells tomorrow in a back room.”

“I offer glimpses. People make choices.”

“You offer avoidance dressed in fancy language.”

“Sometimes avoidance keeps a person alive.”

There it was again. The clean little moral shelter he kept tucked in his vest pocket. It was his imagined high ground.

I stood and walked to him. “Verde says rupture is required.”

“Let’s talk about Dr. Verde,” he said.

“What about her?”

“You have feelings for her.”

“Maybe I do. What business is that of yours?”

He was quiet for a moment. That was one of the things that made him more dangerous than louder men. He never rushed to defend himself. He simply waited for time to become favorable. Then he opened the briefcase. No flourish of salesmanship. Just a simple motion, like a banker retrieving a form that I would need to sign in triplicate.

He placed a card-sized object on the desk between us. It looked ordinary in the way some snakes do. Matte black. No markings. No visible seam. Thin enough to slide into a wallet, heavy enough to suggest it contained more than it had a right to. When he nudged it forward, I felt the room go subtly attentive.

“One preview,” he said.

“Of what?” I kept my distance from the thing. I felt my pulse object to its presence.

“I’m sure you would like to tell her how you feel. Men like you are always so guarded, though. A pity. Love is a many splendored thing and all that. And yet you find it inexplicably safer to keep all that to yourself. Pity. A woman like Dr. Calico Verde makes a man get out of bed every morning eager to prove to her why he’s the luckiest son of a bitch on Earth.”

I turned away from him, looked out the window at the city and all its obliviousness. I smoked. He kept talking.

“Imagine catching a glimpse of the day you tell her how you feel.” He tapped the object. “You’d know how it would go. Maybe she rejects you and you can choose to avoid the conversation altogether. Save yourself the trouble. Maybe she tells you she feels the same way. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to get a jump on things and start your life with her?”

Outside, somewhere beyond the sealed neutrality of the office, a siren passed and faded. The city had started sounding provisional to me. Every noise carried a question mark. Every person looked like they might be standing one declined day away from cracking open like thin ice. I wondered if Calico had had her own glimpses. Wondered if anyone of them involved me.

“You don’t want me as a client,” I said.

“I’m offering you one look, Silas. No dependency. No arrangement. No debt beyond the philosophical kind, and you already carry plenty of that.”

My eyes turned on the black card. It’s important, in moments like these, to admit when temptation doesn’t arrive dressed as pleasure. Sometimes it arrives dressed as relief. It wears the face of the one thing you told yourself you’d never ask to know. Sure, I want to tell Calico I’m crazy about her. She’s the one true thing in my crazy world of probabilities and maybes and metaphysical conundrums. Loving her would give me peace. Her loving me would give me something I’ve never experienced.

Joy.

What if The Archivist was right? What if I could know how she feels before baring my soul? Like he said, I could save myself the heartbreak in advance. Drown it out alone with a bottle of cheap whiskey from a plastic bottle. Get over it. Move on. She’d be none the wiser.

The Archivist watched my silence and recognized it for what it was: not indecision, but location. I had arrived at the door and was pretending I was still in the hallway.

“Just one,” he said softly. “Doesn’t have to be your profession of love to the desirable Dr. Verde. Pick a day. Any day.”

My hand moved before my principles could get organized. My fingers hovered above the card.

And in the black surface, before I touched it, I saw the date.

*******

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