“Not really,” said Lenny. “Born in Pahokee. Family never kept up with their roots, so I didn’t hear much. Did a little bit here and there. Worked in an airline parts depot in Opa-Locka because I got to fly around the country for free. I’m a Jets fan but the games aren’t broadcast here, so I’d fly up to La Guardia or Newark every Sunday to watch them in the airport lounge and fly right back after the game. Then one Wednesday I’m at the airport here. I’m driving the parts van on the edge of the runway and I hear yelling. ‘Stop him! Stop him!’ I see some guy in a silk shirt and gold chains running from a Cessna being chased by a Jack Webb type. So I blocked him off with my van at the corner of a building. The guy reaches in his pants. I think he’s going to blow me away, but he pulls out a kilo bag and throws it at my window and it explodes in this white cloud and I can’t see anything. The federal agent tackles the guy from behind and his face comes through the cloud and smashes up against my window, a big blood streak where his nose hit the glass and dragged down. The agent cuffs him and starts yelling his head off, punching the guy in the liver: ‘Don’t… you… ever… make… me… run!…’ They haul the guy off and he’s shouting that he’ll come back and get me, and the other employees said I should leave town, so I head to Broward and get a job cleaning the inside of cop cars because of all the drugs you find where handcuffed suspects stuff them in the backseat crack. I moved again when my dad died and the will gave me a little condo they used to rent out in Kendall. I was up visiting some friends in Georgia one weekend, and I’m coming home at sunset on a Sunday and the other side of I-95 is jammed with cars heading north, barely moving. But there’s absolutely nobody on my side of the highway. I mean nobody. I must have driven a hundred miles without seeing another car. And the people crawling along in the northbound lanes are pointing at me. I’m thinking, That’s odd. Is there something going on I don’t know about? But I dismiss it and keep going. I get to my neighborhood and it’s ghost town. Even the twenty-four-hour convenience stores are closed, plywood on the windows. Now I’m thinking, Okay, something’s definitely up. I turn on the TV, and they’re talking about this Hurricane Andrew. I try to find some sports or cartoons, but every channel is the hurricane. So I figure screw it — I’ll go work on my car. Which is real drudgery unless you’re high, so I’m out there at midnight laying on the ground, blowing a fat one and draining my oil pan, and the wind starts to pick up and I begin getting this sideways rain under the car, really hard, stinging like hundreds of little pins. But I’m thinking it’s just really good dope. A fence picket tears loose and hits the car, then something else breaks the passenger window. I finally put two and two together — can this Hurricane Andrew be what all the hoopla’s about? I make a mental note to start reading the papers. I head to the house, but there’s no power and my sliding glass doors have buckled, but luckily I’ve got two twelve-packs in the fridge. So I sit down and start drinking. But after a while it’s not fun anymore. With the sliding doors down, there’s way too much wind in the room, and everything’s flying around and hitting me. I start to take a real beating. My beer can collection, CDs, Playboy videos. I’m getting my butt kicked by my own shit. I don’t need it. I say, Fuck this, and I go out in the stairwell. It is one of those sturdy concrete jobs with a padlocked storage area underneath for bicycles and lawn mowers. I crawl in there with the rest of my beer and a radio and a candle. I’m not sure exactly when I passed out, but the next morning the only thing left standing was that stairwell. The insurance company paid for everything, and I spent the money on a six-month kick-ass cocaine party. I’ve never had so many friends. Then I was living in my car for a while. I got like a million parking tickets, and I was towed once while passed out in the backseat. They must not have noticed me. I woke up, climbed over into the front and drove out of the towing yard when they opened the gate for one of the trucks. Did you know you can get all your parking tickets canceled just by mailing in your death certificate? Doesn’t matter how many you have — they erase every one. But after I died three times, they got really upset. So I had to leave town again….”
Serge was staring with his mouth open.
“Serge?”
“What?”
“Why are we here?”
“That’s an awfully big question, Lenny. I guess if you believe in God, it’s a little easier. If not, you might have to go with the unified field theory.”
“No, I mean, why are we here right now? Why did we come to this place? I forget.”
“We came here to…” Serge stopped. “Why did we come here?”
