The Absolved by Matthew Binder

Author:Matthew Binder [Binder, Matthew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781732400733
Publisher: Black Spot Books

22

Serena has invited me to play a round of golf at Half Moon Bay, one of only two golf courses left in the region. All of the others shut down because they couldn’t afford the hefty tab on the water bill to keep the courses immaculate and green. Eighteen holes here costs roughly ten-thousand dollars per person, and the waiting list is six months, unless you’re a member, which Serena is. An annual membership costs over a million per year.

It’s the first day of summer where the temperatures won’t reach the nineties. Instead, they’ll top out at eighty-seven. Still, the sun is high, and there’s not a single cloud on the horizon.

The clubhouse is one of the last remaining vestiges of a patriarchal society. At each table lounge five to seven middle-aged men, wattle-faced, in brightly colored, short-sleeved polo-shirts, ill-fitting pants, and visors. Each man has a cigar and a scotch. They don’t speak about but bellow on the usual topics—money, sports, and women. The staff is inordinately young and attractive, there to do the bidding of these men, and, in the process, subjecting themselves to all manners of harassment and abuse.

I find Serena at the bar, tended by a six-foot five-inch-tall, excessively well-built, blond-headed man, clearly of Viking lineage, who is rapt before the story with which she’s regaling him. It’s from her college days, and therefore inappropriate and crass. The bartender is totally smitten, and she knows it. But it’s also as plain how little any of this means to her.

The first hole sits along the edge of a cliff, the Pacific Ocean far below, the crashing of the waves on rocks faint in the distance. The far side of the course is lined with Cypress trees whose roots protrude from the ground in the shape of elbows and knees. High in the branches of one, intermittently keening, a hawk watches over us. A skinny, college-aged boy with a hint of acne meets us with our cart and clubs. Serena tells him to fetch us a twelve pack of beer, and he dashes off. She’s already spent an hour at the range this morning, she says, and is striking the ball well.

We hop in the cart, and Serena takes a couple hits off her gram-pen, then offers it to me. I haven’t smoked pot since high school. All I want to do when I’m high on weed is hide in my bed with the lights off and wait for the apocalypse. Cautiously, not wanting to offend, I decline.

“I’ve been meaning to ask,” I say. “How did your meeting with Taylor go?”

“What a sweetheart that girl is. It’s no wonder you like her so much.”

“Like I said, she’s a family friend.”

“Why does she want to be a doctor anyway?”

“I suppose the same reasons we all got in to it.”

“Because the money isn’t what it used to be. The federal government’s broke. And modern medicine has brought about its own demise. No one ever dies anymore. They just keep clinging, even when they have no reason.

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