Part 20: Bobby

Friday night, Bobby Melrose had a troubled dream in which he was a professional dog-walker, struggling to hold onto the leash of a large, black dog as it tried to run away from him. He didn’t believe in dream analysis as a rule, but the symbolism here was a little on-the-nose. It was too bad his subconscious wasn’t more creative. At least make him work a little bit, for Christ’s sake.

Speaking of Christ, he wondered if his hotel room had a Gideon’s bible in it. Sure enough, there it was, in the first dresser drawer - one that had surely never held any clothes, only there to provide travelers with a sense of comfort, or at least prevent the vague, inexplicable sensation of discomfort they might feel if forced to sleep in a room without a dresser in it - hidden underneath a take-out menu and a laminated list of TV channels. A far more potent symbol than Bobby’s brain could come up with.

Maybe the problem was that Xander wasn’t raised religious, Bobby thought. When you were raised religious, you saw firsthand how boring it was. Secular folk (where did that phrase come from? Bobby hadn’t heard anyone talk like that in a long time) always thought there was more to it than there really was. They thought they had to be missing something. That was why they went on spiritual pilgrimages to Bali or wherever. 

No one from Bali ever went on a spiritual pilgrimage to Bali.

Bobby put the Bible, menu, and channel list back in their proper order, and fell back into bed. He grabbed his Blackberry - his Life, he half-ironically called it, figuring if he said it first then no one else could use it against him - from the end-table. There were some loose ends that were still bothering him.

The Black Carousel interview had been edited. 

All interviews were edited, obviously. No one wants to read the way people actually talk. But it had been so edited that its editor had made a point of saying that it was edited. It was edited even by an editor’s standard. And Xander himself had seemed unhappy with the final product, which made Bobby wonder - what exactly had been left out?

It was 8 AM on the east coast, which meant it was 5 AM in California. But he was going to have to suck it up. Of the two people in the conversation, Bobby was the one making the bigger sacrifice, after all. Talking to this pretentious fuck was possibly the least enjoyable part of his job. He’d have taken a four-hour deep dive with Britttni on the root causes of her eating disorder over a ten-minute chat with this guy. But such are the sacrifices we make.

He dialed the number, let his thumb hover over the little green phone for a few seconds as a gift to himself, then pressed it quickly as if it were physically painful. As he listened to the ringback tone, one of those classical music songs that are so iconic they sound like nothing (one of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons maybe, or that Mozart one that’s in jewelry commercials), he had the passing thought: how can Xander think he can Ridiculous himself out of a job when this guy still has one?

“Mister Melrose,” the voice said, almost mid-Atlantic in its degree of enunciation. There was no indication of sleepiness or annoyance, which annoyed Bobby. “To what, pray tell, do I owe the pleasure?”

“Hey, Cicero,” he said, using the journalist’s preferred name. Like Xander Cross, he had shed his birth name for one of his own choosing; unlike with Xander, it hadn’t caught on. People only called him Cicero deliberately, out of a conscious effort.

The curious thing, though, was that they didn’t think of him as his birth name, either. Every individual in Cicero’s orbit had some private descriptor they used for him in their inner monologue. Bobby’s happened to be “that fuck,” but they weren’t all negative. The man himself, though, was blissfully ignorant of this, and moreover, still believed that the name Cicero was a subtle way to associate himself with great writing and oration.

“Your voice is a melody to mine ears, my ami,” Cicero said.

“Likewise,” Bobby said, laying back down on the massive pile of white down pillows that the hotel thought he required. “So, Cic, I’ve got a question for you, you know that interview you did with Xander back in the fall, right before the last album dropped. I was hoping to get my hands on the full transcript of it. We’re having a little bit of a talent management issue here and . . .”

“Ah, yes. That interview. I well remember the experience. It was neither the best nor the worst, but it was - if I may be so bold to break with best practices - I speak of syntax - the bizarrest.”

“Oh, yeah? How so?”

There was a pause on the other end. Some pauses are pregnant; this one had at least missed its period by a few days and was starting to get nervous. “Perhaps it would be most prudent for me to send you the interview in its entirety so that you may draw your own conclusions,” Cicero said eventually. “I suspect my skills of summation are scarcely sufficient for the task.”

Here it was: the man’s most annoying attribute, far worse than the alliteration and purple prose. “Please, Cicero, it would be a great help if you could just give me a basic . . .”

“No, no, I fear that my own judgments and conclusions would lead you astray, being formed by such an inferior mind as mine.”

“I’m sure your conclusions are brilliant,” Bobby said, gritting his teeth. “But, in any case . . .”

“Oh, surely you engage in flattery, Mr. Melrose.”

“No, no, never. You think I made it to where I am by flattery? That will take you to a point, but then people see through it, Cicero, as you well know, after all wasn’t it your namesake who said, ‘the truth shall out?’ But, while I am eager to hear your interpretation of the conversation, if it’s any consolation I promise not to let it influence mine.”

“All right, if you insist,” Cicero replied, sounding damn near gleeful. “Firstly. Mr. Cross gave me at least two answers for every question I asked him. The former was often prefaced, and here I paraphrase Mr. Cross himself, with ‘I know what you want me to say.’ Furthermore, the latter answers often directly contradicted the first. I’m no psychoanalyst, but perhaps this is a sign of a divided mind? I’m hesitant to diagnose schizophrenia but . . .”

“Interesting, okay. What else?”

“In the printed interview, of course, it was necessary for me to choose a single answer, and I did so through a rather ingenious scientific method involving a coin and a dice block, which I can expound upon at a later date should it pique your interest . . .”

“Sure, sounds interesting.”

“Oh? Really?” Cicero’s feigned surprise caused Bobby to grit his teeth again. This was why his dentist was always trying to sell him on a mouth guard. Occupational hazard.

“It’ll have to wait, though, I’m on a bit of a time crunch here. So was there a ‘secondly’ here, or what?”

“Well, there was one question that really seemed to get Mr. Cross’s proverbial goat, and it baffled this reporter, as it seemed among the most innocuous. And his answer, when it did finally come, was fully in line with expectations. Granted, this question, alone among those of the interview, was not pre-meditated, but an extemporaneous response to something else Mr. Cross had uttered, part of what we in the journalism business call a back-and-forth, or repartee, for the Francophiles among us. But I can see no reason why that fact alone should have incensed my subject so.”

“Wait, wait, which question exactly are we talking about here?”

“I speak,” Cicero began, “of the single political query I have posed to our mutual friend in the course of three interviews together; a question that I now regret deeply, though not for any anguish that it may have caused me, the target of his tirade, but for the inexplicable horrors its asking evidently awakened in the subject’s soul.”

“So like I said I’m on a bit time crunch, so, gun to your head . . .”

“Same. Sex. Marriage.”

“Ah, got it. Listen, Cicero, can you send me the transcript of what Xander said right after you asked that question? The whole thing, don’t leave anything out, you’re not going to offend me, it’s nothing I haven’t heard before, so on and so forth, thanks, you’ve got my email right, have a solid day.” And Bobby hung up before Cicero could respond. The email would come either way.