The Glamour, Part III

That evening, I walked into the apartment that Tom, myself, Essie, and The Gothic shared.
            Tom was sitting in a kitchen chair.  He was sitting in front of the glass door to the patio, and the sun was just kissing the gently rolling Southern California foothills.  Tom was silhouted by that light.  All the details of his profile were washed out in the sun.
            But there was something in his posture.  He sat upright.  Not moving.  Not doing anything.  Just sitting.
            “Hey Tom, what’s happening?” I said. 
            He looked up at me bleary-eyed.  If we hadn’t had another raid planned for the evening, I would have suspected him of drinking.  The four of us participated in our share of indulgences, but never before a raid.  I suppose that the raids were enough of a high, we didn’t need to combine it with the liquor or pot.
            “I don’t know.” He answered, taking my question in a way I hadn’t quite intended.  He pondered that.  “Actually, I’m afraid that I do.”
            I thought I took his meaning.  “The tennis game was weird, this afternoon.”
            He shook his head.  But he still hadn’t really moved.  He was still just sitting there, not looking at me, not turning his body to face me.  It seemed like he’d been wrung out.
            “She left me.”
            “Because of the tennis game?”
            He shrugged.  “The tennis game crystallized it all for her.”  He looked at me, desperately. 
            “I don’t understand.”
            “I’d seen it coming.”  He said.  And then he repeated himself “I’d seen it coming.  And… and I couldn’t do anything about it.  Do you understand that?  I couldn’t do anything about it.  Because I can’t act, anymore, I can only react.”
            I reached out and put my hand on his shoulder.  It was awkward.  But I didn’t know what else to do.  I didn’t know what else to say.
            “After the raid tonight.” I finally said “After the raid, I think we need to have a little pow-wow, the four us.  And maybe we need to do more than just talk.  Maybe we need to go back to the stone circle.”
 
            Things continued to change, that night.  
            We’d fallen into this ritual, before the raids.  We’d go over the location, the plans, the back-up plans, the rendevous locations if things went south or if we got separated.  And then… we’d all just chill.
            But during the chill time, Tom produced this old wooden baseball bat.  He’d driven some nails through the end.  It looked like something out of a mad max movie.
            And The Gothic, he’d taken to sitting in the corner of the living room and… entertaining himself with the his shadows.  They’d always sort-of clung to him.  But now, they were begininning to… move over him, undulate, almost.  He looked high, and the whole thing was creepy.
            I knew that Essie shared my discomfort.  But I didn’t say anything to her about it.
            The thing was, I was beginning to realize that saying things to Essie, that wasn’t the wisest thing to do.  Especially when they were worries.   We all have that superstition that when we say a thing outloud, it’ll come true.  When it came to Essie, though, this wasn’t just a superstition.
            “You’re hair is blue.” I observed because there wasn’t much else I wanted to say.  She’d been home all day, and I hadn’t seen her in the bathroom dieing it.  I hadn’t smelled that scary chemical hair-dye smell.
            She smiled “You like it?  Somebody saw me out of the corner of my eye.  My hair was only black, but they saw it wrong.  I just grabbed onto it.”
            “Is that where the combat boots came from?”  She had punk-rocker, knee high leather boots. 
            “Actually… I kind of psyched myself into those.”  I could tell she’d been wanting to share that.
            I was surprised when The Gothic tossed his two cents in; I hadn’t been aware he’d been tuned into our conversation.  “You psyched yourself into them?”
            She raised an eyebrow at him.  “Pretty cool, huh?  I just convinced myself that they were in the closet.”
            Tom was off on the other side of the living room, twirling his baseball bat around.  I wondered if he could enter into the conversation even if he wanted to.  Then I got it.  The real problem was that he wouldn’t even want to.  He wouldn’t just enter into the conversation.  He’d have to respond.  Not because he was forced to only respond.  But he was reaching a point where it wouldn’t even occur to him to initiate it.
            “What do you think, Tom?  Should she wish us up a couple hundred dollar bills?”
            Tom considered the possibility.  And he smiled.  It was the old Tom’s smile.  It made me realize how much I was missing him already.
            “Why stop at a couple hundred?”
            (Since that time I’ve pondered a thing, perhaps a small thing.  We were four college students with part time jobs that paid barely above minimum wage.  Somehow there was always enough money for rent, for pizza, for car insurance.  Once I sat down and tried to figure out how we all could have covered our bills.  It really isn’t possible.
            But we all believed that there’d be enough money.  And so there always was, thank’s to Essie’s glamour.  A pretty weird thing.)
            “If we turn our glamour too much to our own selfish gain they’ll disappear” I said.  Sometimes things would come out of my mouth and I wouldn’t even know what I was saying.  This was one of those times.
            The Gothic’s words cut across our activities and banter in a way I can’t quite explain.  We all stopped and looked at him, as his words sank in, a natural repercussion of the pronouncement I’d just made.
            “O.K… but aren’t we doing that in the raids?  Turning our glamour to our own selfish gain?”
           
            Essie considered this.  She didn’t sound sure of herself, though, when she spoke.  None of us were.  “But the raids aren’t for our own selfish gain.  They are why we were entrusted with the glamour in the first place.”
            The thing I new, atleast this time I was able to keep it to myself.  Perhaps I was able to avoid saying it aloud because I knew that the rest of them were already aware of the truth.  The truth was that the raids were no longer a calling, or an honor.  They were no longer a duty.  They were an adrenaline rush and an addiction.  That night, we all seemed to know that we were headed for a fall.