Any Resemblance to Actual Persons by Kevin Allardice Page A

think?
    Oliver was always excoriating me to be subtler, which at the time I took to mean he didn’t want to hear what I had to say, preferred it hidden beneath artifice. But I must have feared that he was right, which was why, a year later, when I finally did get that story published,I neglected to tell him about it. Of course, at the time I told myself that I was embarrassed not by the story but by the venue (it appeared in COLAtitude Review , a two-staple lit rag run by the COLA poetry club and distributed for free in the commons on a rack next to the vending machines). But I suspect now that there was something in that story that I didn’t want to show Oliver again, like something I’d blurted out in a drunken moment and wished I could take back. Maybe he was right. Maybe I was sentimental. But so what? Isn’t that the point? Boats against the current and all that? Not for the ever-cool Oliver, who seemed to have nothing pulling him back, had no affinity for a shared past, was wired to look only forward. Even as he stood there in the La Quinta Inn parking lot, leaning his head down to the open window of my car, he told me, “You’re not very subtle, are you?”
    â€œI wasn’t trying to hide.”
    â€œWhat were you trying to do?”
    â€œI just wanted to talk to you.”
    â€œThere are less psychotic ways, you know.”
    Oliver’s features looked a little more finely etched now than they had that afternoon, the seams in his face a little deeper, the lines more spidery. Perhaps it was the strange light or the contrast of my nostalgia, but I could see the gray at his temples, a single hair wiring out of his nostril. I got out of the car. He backed away a little. “Oliver,” I said, “you can’t seriously be taking Edie seriously. She’s seriously unstable. She’s seriously insane. She’s just looking for attention.”
    â€œPaul. Just read the manuscript. I’m serious when I say—I mean, I mean it when I say I think there’s a way you can be involved with this. Just—talk to me when you’ve read it, okay?”
    A platoon of cleaning women was unloading from a van on the opposite side of the parking lot with military order and precision, like the A-Team disguised in dark-bunned wigs and gingham skirts.
    A bouncy digital chime went off and Oliver pulled a cell phone from his pocket, one of those ones that folds clamshell-like in half. “Yeah,” he said into the phone, “I’m on my way up. Don’t touch that stuff, just watch some TV.” He hung up, turned ten degrees toward La Quinta, looked at me.
    â€œHey,” I said. “You remember that story about Chicago?”
    â€œChicago? You mean that time we saw them in concert?”
    â€œNo,” I said. We’d never seen Chicago in concert; he must have been thinking of someone else. “You remember. That story I wrote. There was that guy, and we drove there.”
    â€œI’m sorry, Paul. I need to get back to the room. I need to give Yuna her nighttime pills. I’m really sorry I can’t talk right now.” He approached me and gave me a quick half-hug thing, and a very conclusive backslap, then before I could figure out how exactly to reciprocate, he was walking across the parking lot, looking back at me and saying, “Read your sister’s book, okay? And call me.”
    I did what he said. Unfortunately, not in that order. First, from a pay phone a block away, its receiver redolent of vinegary piss, I called his cell phone, the number of which I had on his business card. I was going to tell him about getting “Chicago” published, though I’d probably omit the part about it being fifteen years ago in a Xeroxed zine; I’d tell him it was forthcoming in Ploughshares, VQR , or The Quarterly , all three maybe. His phone rang for a while, then went to voicemail. I hesitated for a moment, listened to my