Adverbs by Daniel Handler Read Free Book Online Page B

better tips.”
    “We’re going to tip you,” I said, “at the end of our day.”
    The bartender snorted and caressed a blank TV which hung silent near the ceiling. He touched it like he could bring it back to life. “Not like you said,” he murmured sadly, and Lila changed the subject.
    “Everybody has a theory today,” she said. “That woman leaving as we came in? She had a blackjack theory, how to win. It also had to do with birds, come to think of it, but they were her own birds, in cages.”
    I took a delicious sip. The bourbon was perfect but then it almost always is. “My theory is,” I said, “pay no attention to theories in bars.”
    Lila patted my hand and took a fake sip of water. “You should get a guy like that .”
    “You just like him because he said you have tits,” I said.
    “No no no.” Lila shook her head very carefully. “Clean him up and turn off his music and he’s the guy for you. I alwaysthought you’d do well with a guy who was apocalyptic. It would remind you nothing is the end of the world.”
    “Except when it is,” I said, too quietly with my mouth full of drink. I ordered another. She was comforting me, which made me sick. Lila was the sick one, the one who ought to be comforted. This was an old song, too: she was sick and dying, for sure, in a lot of pain. We couldn’t drive north enough to escape this: young people in a deserted bar, drinking as death approaches, and still the men come at us and still we notice them. The only thing you haven’t heard about it is how rare she was, such a rare gastrointestinal thing that the doctors could never hide their excitement when they were called into the room. There had only been eight previous cases, one of them Lila’s mother, who had died helpless, aching and coughing all over and finally screaming, Lila told me, when Lila was the only visitor left to her.
    It had been Lila and her mother; today it was Lila and me. Lila had undergone one operation that had been invented since, when they rerouted a part of her intestines or some such shit, and for a while there’d been a capful of hope, sort of. They thought in a couple of years she might be able to eat, and when she farted the doctors opened a bottle of champagne to celebrate. They poured it into urine sample cups in the hospital room, except she couldn’t have any and the doctors were on duty, so I finished the bottle myself and watched her doze in the upright bed. But it’s always dawnest before dark. Now she had a beeper clipped to her waist, for when some poor soul with the same blood type stepped in front of a bus and offered up a digestive system, but even thiswas not the sort of hope one hopes for. This was hope that the operation would work for a few weeks, so that the doctors could learn something and maybe fix the next person. Lila herself would be granted more pain and a few months unless she died first. Hope was now hitched to the doctors, who were handsome to a fault and wore leather jackets when I saw them walking in the parking lot. Hope was hitched to them, and not to Lila, who rarely got to leave the room.
    She wasn’t supposed to be here, of course, but it depended on how you phrased it. Lila and I had phrased it as “Can we take a walk around the block and maybe even sit out on the spiky hospital grass?” The nurses were glued to the TV and gave us an absent okay, but instead we got into my car and left Seattle in the belly of a ferry across Puget Sound. It wasn’t far, but it was far away, the ferry line the only thread which would lead us back. We drove north past Bainbridge and Kingston in search of the name that always cracked us up: Point No Point. There was a new casino, who knew? Inside it wasn’t easy to find a place that didn’t have the Super Bowl blaring on the screen. We weren’t interested in the year’s big football contest. We didn’t think those guys needed any more encouragement. It took me waiting for the bartender to slip out