Jack

1

I woke up covered in my own blood. It had congealed between the right side of my head and the pillow, and I had to peel the damn pillow away, as if it were a crusty bandage. I held the pillow in front of me, staring in disgust at the brown splatter on the white slip. All the while I was trying to remember what had happened the night before.

I’d been having dinner with my fiancée, and her brother and his girlfriend. What a ball that had been. Listening to Jesus talk about himself all evening. That was Pita’s brother’s name, Jesus. Ironic how the one guy I’d ever met named after a god had an ego of a god to match. His girlfriend, Elizaveta, was far too good for him. Smart, down-to-earth, attractive. I didn’t know how he landed her. Actually I did: money. Pita’s and Jesus’s father, Marco, turned a mom-and-pop restaurant and pub into a multi-million-dollar brewery, and after Marco died of a brain aneurysm the year before, twenty-nine-year-old Jesus stepped up to the top position.

Setting the stained pillow aside, I touched the cut on my head, igniting a sharp pain that until then had been dormant. The cut ran from the outside of my eyebrow straight to my hairline. Dried blood crumbed beneath my fingertips and fell to the bed like red dandruff.

Recalling what happened, I cringed in embarrassment.

We’d been sitting on the back deck, the four of us. Dinner was finished. Jesus had been smoking one of his expensive cigars and going on about a skiing trip to Chile he and Elizaveta had gone on the previous winter. I was only half listening until he launched into some ridiculous story that had him backcountry skiing outside the ski resort’s boundaries, which he reached by helicopter. I chuckled loudly. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe him. Pita once told me she and Jesus had gone on skiing trips every year when they were younger. So I assumed he was a decent enough skier. It was the bragging. Making sure to mention the chartered helicopter, the difficulty of the off-piste terrain, his entourage, which included a famous Mexican singer.

I wasn’t nitpicking or being overly critical of Jesus. Everything the guy said and did was orchestrated to make him look good, to make people want to admire him, to see him as the apotheosis of success. Yet at the same time it was all layered in humility, like he was just one of the guys. His efforts were so transparent he became a caricature, a joke. You couldn’t help not laughing at him sometimes.