Cat In A Sapphire Slipper

“Actually, Mr. Randolph,” she said at last, “being drunk is the only rational explanation for why you weren’t more seriously injured. The surgeons said your fall had the impact of a car crash at sixty miles an hour. You should be dead, or in a cast up to your cerebellum. Instead, you have a couple of broken legs. Not fun, but not as lethal as it should be.”

“You’d prefer me dead?”

“Of course not. But the surgeons said that the only way you could have come off so lightly, the only way anyone did from an impact like that, was as a drunk driver. The kind that walks away from a crash that kills his victims because he was so inebriated his body was utterly limp during the crash. Senselessness saves the sinner.”

He didn’t like hearing how bad it could have been. Or being compared to a drunk driver. He knew he hadn’t brought this on himself. Why was she trying to make him feel guilty? Some shrink! She was doing everything she could to rile him. Weren’t there laws against this kind of patient abuse?

He gazed out the window. From this distance the majestic peaks seemed only postcard pretty, not lethal. And he couldn’t picture himself attacking those sharp icy teeth with pitons and a pickax. Not his thing. But it must be.

He glanced back. Her eyes had never left his face.

“Maybe,” he said, “I’m just a relaxed kind of guy.”

“That doesn’t go with the control freak.”

“Maybe I’m more complex than you think.”

“Oh, I think you’re very complex, Mr. Randolph. Too much so. I don’t want to keep you. À bientôt.”

Until later.

He watched her leave, relishing a future tete-à-tete. His legs were broken, maybe not badly, thank God, but she was right about his need for control. He hated this wheelchair.

He propelled it into the adjoining bathroom, through a bland blond door wide enough to accommodate it. Brushed steel assistance bars were everywhere, but he was interested in the shower rod above the—nice, if his casts were off!—Jacuzzi bathtub.

Pushing himself upright against the white-tiled wall, he studied the rod and its attachments to the tile. Solid. Everything here was for security and safety. German-built. Like Revienne Schneider.

He grasped the pole underhanded and then hauled up against his imprisoned legs. If he was such a gung ho mountain climber, he didn’t want to lose any upper body strength. He guessed he’d been doing this during every conscious, unchaperoned moment. The first pull-up was still agony. The second worse. He did ten. Twelve, twenty, then stopped and lowered himself on trembling arms into the wheelchair.

He’d forgotten to check himself out in the mirror over the sink while he’d been upright, but it was probably just as well. He had a feeling he wouldn’t recognize his face. He knew “things,” could think, but he didn’t know a damn thing about himself or how he’d got here. What really bothered him was the name “Randolph.” It had a vague familiarity, but it wasn’t his. It didn’t feel like his name.

Nothing did. Surnames tumbled through his brain—O’Donnell . . . Kinkaid . . . Bar . . . Bartle. Moline. But that was a town in Illinois. His brain had salvaged lots of general information, but no specifics. No faces and places. He’d have to analyze himself before that tight-lipped shrink pried out more than he wanted her to.

He knew a lot about mountains and foreign languages and attractive interrogators, but he didn’t know a damn thing about himself except what he could weasel out of his shrink.

Nothing.

Not even his name.

Matt, maybe. The name just came to him! Matt?

Matt Randolph. Didn’t feel right.

From Here

to Urbanity

Even long, lean Fontana brothers, Las Vegas’s own Magnificent Ten, have to disembark from the Rolls onto the desert sand when we arrive at the party destination in the dark of evening.

Wait a minute. Desert sand?

I am not the only one befuddled, although I am the only one who is licking sand grains from between my unshod toes.

“Hey,” says one plaintive voice. “This isn’t the strip club, is it?”

By now three rounds of champagne have sloshed in the gathered glasses, except for Mr. Matt’s and mine.

That extra-dark tint on the Rolls’s windows may have been disorienting.

“Naw, that must be the place,” Emilio announces, gesturing with his still-full champagne glass.

Indeed, amidst the Stygian darkness that surrounds the party we can see the illuminated glitter of a large entrance canopy.

(This Stygian darkness is like super-dark shades and refers to some ancient place underground, like a cave. Or a wine cellar. Or a tomb. Even now I do not quite grasp our situation. And I am the only one in the party fit to grasp anything, except for Mr. Matt, who is starting to frown just before the Rolls headlights go out and we are all truly in the dark.)

The sound of leather soles grinding on sand guides me forward. Mr. Matt and I have been abandoned to trek along behind the brothers ten and Uncle Mario.