Chapter Eleven
NICKY
Time was a stubborn bastard. It sped up and slowed down, flexed and contracted with no discernable predictability as far as Nicky could tell. And that was just while he was in the drive-thru line at Starbucks or sitting on the tarmac waiting to take off.
The way time lived in Nicky’s mind was even more confusing.
He could remember some things with such clarity that they felt like they’d just happened.
Other things, even things that had once seemed important, faded away.
Leaving behind only the memory of a memory, like a file with a name but no contents in his internal hard drive.
So it was that Nicky Broome, lounging in his boxer briefs in a chair overlooking the Las Vegas Strip, concluded that time was meaningless.
How else could anyone explain being in the same room with Lucy Rollins almost thirty years after the first time and feeling both like no time and all the fucking time had passed simultaneously? Time was obviously nothing but an illusion, a trick of the mind.
If he could still summon the old magic, he would write all these thoughts down in one of the crisp new Moleskine notebooks he still kept in his carry-on.
They were there, waiting. He couldn’t say if it was out of habit or hope, but they were there.
Even though he hadn’t been able to hear the music for a goddamn age.
That thing inside him, the one that had guided him through so much trouble and given him so much joy, was silent. It had been for a while. A year, maybe more. No songs. Who was he kidding? Not so much as a single note or word – for more than a year.
That, too, was a subject for contemplation. But for some other day. The silence was too frustrating and painful. It made him feel lonesome, maudlin, and restless.
Anyway, what he really wanted to do wasn’t write. What he really wanted was to be in the same room with Lucy again. Any way he could have her. And there was one stretch of time in particular that his mind could play at will, as clearly as an IMAX film in 3D.