Friend Is Not a Verb by Daniel Ehrenhaft Read Free Book Online Page B

precarious ability to relax. It’s not the whiskey itself, although that helps. It’s the act. It’s watching that luscious amber liquid flow into the glass precisely as the hour hand and second hand overlap, pointing skyward in unison. I can’t have it any other way.
    I keep the whiskey on the mantel in the living room, in the exact center of the house, in a windowless cell that wasoriginally built as a shrine for the Hindu god Ganesh. To get there, I have to walk through several narrow corridors, down two ramps, and up at least one partial spiral staircase. There are four spiral staircases altogether.
    The journey takes exactly thirty-four seconds. My bedroom is on what I suppose could be called the second floor, though there are no “floors” in the true sense of the word; there are levels at varying heights. The house isn’t designed for ease of movement. It isn’t designed to be comfy or homey. It’s designed specifically to repel leyaks: Balinese demons who assume the form of monkeys, birds, and occasionally headless bodies.
    The odd construction made me pretty anxious at first. It took me some practice and time (thirty-two days) to master every single distance, from any room to any other, down to the second. Now I’m used to it. The distance-to-time ratio is firmly ingrained. But the worry still lingers: Will I be late?
    If I am, I will have to pay the consequences. What worries me more than anything is the terrible unknown catastrophe that will inevitably occur if I screw up.
    I paused for a second, confused. Was this a real-live diary, or something Gabriel had made up as he went along? It didn’t read like a diary. I wasn’t sure what it read like. A bad novel? I squirmed in bed, wishing I could ask Sarah if any of this were true. Funny: Emma was right, but not for the reasons she’dimagined. The manuscript wasn’t bursting with any horrifying secrets or acts of depravity. I still couldn’t figure out what Sarah and her friends had actually done .
    I turned to the next page.
    October 24
    Today I raise my glass to toast our home’s original owner: a middle-aged heroin dealer from Bali named Raj Bhutto. He planned to move to the Dominican Republic because he feared deadly reprisals of two kinds: the first being from rival dealers, the second being from the spirit world, for all the terrible sins he had committed. But poor Raj never even made it out of the Eastern Hemisphere. He mysteriously choked to death on a big fat glob of frozen yogurt at a Baskin-Robbins in Hong Kong. According to Sarah, frozen yogurt—“frogurt”—was his “favorite snack.”
    His cruel demise wasn’t an accident. Obviously not. The leyaks had gotten to him. I don’t believe in accidents. I believe in reasons. It was no accident that Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham died after eating four ham rolls and drinking forty shots of vodka, was it? John Bonham loved ham rolls and vodka. Likewise, this Balinese heroin dealer hadn’t died eating grits or a tuna melt. Neither of these foods would have been fitting. Neither was his “favorite snack.”
    On the other hand, the whole story might be a lie. Part of me thinks that Sarah could have made it up in orderto justify why the kitchen isn’t near the dining room. It isn’t even on the same level. A criminal’s desperate effort to evade Balinese demons, or at least to keep them off the premises, certainly provides a convenient excuse for the annoying architectural quirks. If every cubic inch of this place were conceived according to the complex laws of Hindu cosmology, then who are we to complain?
    Before we arrived, Sarah had described the house she’d picked out as a “brand-new mansion on the ocean.” This phrase became a sort of mantra among us. I thought I’d be spending the rest of my life somewhere huge and gaudy, with gold fixtures and marble floors and unused-but-fully-stocked refrigerators—like the houses on MTV’s Cribs.
    But no: In spite of everything,