“Who’s your friend?” says Nico.
I start to talk, to say oh, Nico, I thought you were dead but she puts one finger over her lips to hush me, and I obey, I hush, I stare at her in silence. The smell of Cortez’s cigarette lingers in the room.
“So, listen,” says Nico, and just the sound of her voice is forming the heat of tears in my eyes. “It’s happening. It’s a go.” She looks exactly as she did the day of the yearbook photo, the picture in my jacket pocket: she’s grown her hair back out and she’s wearing her glasses again, her old ones, from when she was in high school. I can’t believe she even still has them. I want to leap up and hug her. I’ll put her on the handlebars of the bike, I’ll put Houdini in the wagon to ride behind us. I’ll take her back home.
“Everything went exactly as planned,” she’s saying. “They brought him down here. That scientist, the one I told you about? We’ve got him. We’re going to England in the morning, and he and the team he knows there will initiate the standoff burst. Show that asteroid who’s boss.” I mouth the words back to her, astonished: “Show that asteroid who’s boss.” She smiles. Her teeth glow white. “It’s all going to be fine,” she says.
I have objections, I have a lot of questions, but Nico presses one flat hand over my mouth, shaking her head, flashing impatience.
“I’m telling you, Hen. I’m telling you. It’s all wrapped up like a beef burrito.” One of the dopey expressions our father used to use, one his favorites. “It’s all squared away. Nothing to worry about.”
This is incredible. Incredible! They did it. Nico did it. She saved the world.
“Listen, though. In the meantime, keep an eye on your goon. I don’t trust him.”
My goon. Cortez.
They never had the pleasure of meeting, those two. They would have liked each other. But Nico never met him. Never heard of him. A pool of melancholy blooms in my chest and rushes out into my body like deep-blue blood. It’s not real. I’m dreaming, and as soon as I know that I am dreaming, Nico fades like a Dickens ghost and is replaced by my grandfather, sallow and sunken, hollowed-out cheeks and staring eyes, sitting in his ancient leather armchair sucking on an American Spirit, muttering to himself.
“Dig a hole,” he says. “Dig a hole.”
*
The smoke is real. Fresh cigarette smoke, rolling down the real police station hallway through the thin cell bars and into my dream. My grandfather really did smoke American Spirits, the same as Nico. Or, rather, Nico smokes them, the same as him. He would curse after each one, say “stupid goddamn things” even as he drew the next one from the pack, fidgeting it with irritation between two old fingers. A man who did not like to enjoy things.
It’s not him smoking now; he’s been dead some years. It’s Cortez, somewhere in the building, working on another butt.
Neither was I really on the thin mattress, tucked in snugly beside our sleeping assault victim; I’m right where I fell down, on the floor in Dispatch, in the shadow of the RadioCOMMAND. I can feel it, still, the warm dream feeling of her hand pressed flat over my mouth, Nico’s hand.
I stand quickly, then buckle from the pins and needles in my legs, reach out and steady myself on the wall with a flat hand. It’s 5:21. It’s morning. How long did I sleep? I follow the curling stink of the smoke and find Cortez back in the cop-car garage, squatting in the center and examining the ground. Our portable coffee rig is erected on one of the shelves, stray grounds clinging in clusters around the mouth of the urn. There’s a thermos at Cortez’s side with steam rising around its edges, mingling with the cigarette smoke.
“Oh, good morning,” he says, without looking up.
“We have to get down there.”
“No kidding.” He grunts, slides down onto his stomach. “I’m working on it.”
“Can we get down there?”
“I’m working on it,” he says again. “Have some coffee.”
I find my steel thermos on the shelf behind me, the one with my name Sharpied on the side, and I pour myself a cup. My dream was obvious wish fulfillment, a classic: Nico’s alive, the threat of the asteroid is ended, Earth survives, I survive. But what about my grandfather, muttering from his deathbed, “Dig a hole”? His actual last words. He said that. Cortez has his face against the floor, one eye opened, one eye closed, cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth while he slowly runs the claw of his hammer along the concrete, squinting at the invisible fracture between the lid and the surrounding floor.
I sip my coffee; it’s hot and bitter and black. I wait ten seconds. “So what do you think? Can we get down there?”
“You’re a very focused individual.”