Spike Falls in Love A Spike Adams Mystery A red diode was blinking in the corner of my mind. Now, as I sat in my office alone, it wouldn't turn off. So I talked to it quietly, saying, "Hush, hush." Even my moral sense seemed affected by the nagging glow that engulfed the straw chair, the crooked coat rack, and the dusty mirror on the wall. "Darn it all, Spike," I chided myself, "you're too old for this kind of thing. A schoolboy crush at your age! "So maybe she overpaid you; maybe a spark of interest danced in her eyes. What of it? Think, Spike. The world is full of collisions without meaning; tiny flames that flare up briefly only to blow out in the limitless vacuum." And yet my conscience wouldn't heed. It lay curled up in the bliss that intoxicates children and makes their waking days an eternity of happy sensations. I continued to spin daydreams while listening to my stack of telephone messages. Then, lo and behold, in that useless stack of salesmen's messages, I heard Amanda White's voice: "Spike, I wonder if I might talk to you. Please, call me." My heart fluttered as I dialed her number. She answered on the first ring. "Hello, Amanda White." "It's Spike," I said. She gasped, "Hi . . . uhhh . . . I wanted to apologize for ambushing you the other day." "No, it's quite all right. I understand," "Do you? Do you really?" I wasn't used to going out on an emotional limb, but I plunged anyway. I stood there perched like an old black crow. "Amanda, I'd like to send you back your check. We're friends, and I don't mix my sauces." She laughed heartily, the same tittering laugh I heard her laugh in the ice cream parlor. By now a rosy flush had spread across my face in the mirror. "So?" she said hesitantly. "We could take a walk in the park." "Sure, what time?" "At noon, near the statue of the Little Mermaid? Do you know where that is?" "Yes. See you there" she said, and hung up. I snapped off the desk lamp and locked the door of my office. On the stairs, I calculated the time it would take to go home. There was an hour and a half, at most. The morning streets lay deserted. They recalled memories of days as a boy when I played truant. Was I playing truant now? And who was this Amanda who pulled so hard at my heartstrings? Was she more than a creature of my imagination? And who was I to her? At home, I splashed some cologne on the back of my neck and quickly changed my shoes. Afterward, I stopped in at the florist. "Something for a date, Andy, please," I called out uncomfortably. Andy smiled, "Well, this is a first, Spike." "Hey, mum's the word, Andy, and I don't mean flowers." "Will this do?" He met me at the counter brandishing a saffron blossom. He placed it in a small box with a bow. "That'll put you back six dollars," he said, clinking the register. His eyes had a twinkle as he drew me closer with a curl of his index finger. Leaning toward me, he whispered, "Love is cool, Spike." I simply scowled. A few minutes later, as I entered the park, I could see the statue of the Little Mermaid sparkling in the sun at the end of the main entrance. The thin outline of a woman stood in its shadow. We didn't say anything for the longest time. We just looked at each other. Then she pointed to the box and said: "Is that for me? "Uh-huh." She gave me a big grin and opened the package. "I wish I were still an innocent flower." "But you are, you are." "No, I'm more like a Venus fly-trap. I seem to attract the kind of people I don't like." "Do you like me?" "Yes!" She nodded vigorously. "I liked you ever since I first saw you. I can't tell you how many times I've watched you -- in the street, in your car, or walking customers to the door." She took my hand in hers and we drifted through the manicured gardens where the grass rustled and the wind carried the smell of fresh morning. Every now and then, she would give me a sidelong glance, her eyes rich with discovery. As we walked beside the lake, our reflections shimmered in the rippling tide. She reached for my chin, and brought her lips to mine. Then we dissolved in a movie screen kiss that made the ground quake and the sky open. She gave me a trusting look that made my heart buckle -- and I felt I was little Spike again, loose in the fields of play. Minutes later, I kissed her goodbye on the cheek. We went our separate ways like two souls doomed for a time to wander the earth before deliverance. When I got back to my office, a long list of e-mail messages awaited me. I strained out the spam and finally found something interesting, a professor at UCLA who wanted me to prepare a proof of concept. And he was ready to pay in advance. Bingo. I set to work decompressing his files, trying to make sense out of his ramblings. Basically, I needed to prove his theory was possible. By dinnertime, I was ready to accept his offer. That night, visions of Amanda danced in my head. The sparkle of her green-brown eyes, her red lips, her ears, nose, hands, and legs. How she stood, how she walked, how she laughed with all her teeth. The feelings that stirred me reached down into my chest, grappled my lungs, and poked an angry finger in my solar plexus. "Love is cool," Andy the florist had chirped. Yeah, right. The next day, the sun was high when I awoke. I felt strangely discomfited, as if I had been pulled roughly from a bad dream. I even failed to recognize my image in the mirror. Some of my confidence was gone. There was something vulnerable there, wistful. My sardonic shell definitely had a kink in it. Then I realized that yesterday's elation had given way to a downswing -- as if in the realm of feeling, the law of gravity applies, and what goes up must invariably come down. Newton had observed more dryly: "When object x exerts a force on object y, object y exerts an opposite and equal force on object x." In short, I was feeling the reaction force of sudden impact. My desultory little life seemed now a stack of rubble, a cloud of dust in an immensity I couldn't fathom. "No time to get religious, Spike," I told myself. Then I remembered what I had failed to do. I hadn't made plans to see her again. Where was my head? When I got to the office, I dialed Amanda's number. Her phone rang and rang, but apparently the cord had been removed and all I was hearing was the telephone company's phony audible signal. "Oh, well, at least there's work to do," I reassured myself. My professor at UCLA wanted his proof of concept and I needed to hustle up a few bucks to pay the rent and electricity. So I began to draw up the specifications. Three days later, I still hadn't heard from Amanda. I had left a pathetic message on her answering machine, which had somehow come back to life, and I had hired a messenger to return her check. Obviously, something was wrong, and that something was probably me. In my confusion, I had failed to grasp that love was just a game with her -- like watching the detective -- and a display of Sunday behavior, followed by leaving me to flap in the wind. Was she expecting anything besides my sadness? Was she expecting me to mull philosophically that "the fortunes of two people don't amount to a hill of beans." Perhaps they didn't. I could only think I wasn't doing everything there was to be done. But was there anything more to be done? I suppose not. I just couldn't solve the mystery. My visions of trailing sunlight and daisies faded with the onset of the fourth day. Then rain lashed the pavements during the lonely hours I spent doing my microscopic detail -- my cleanup work for the professor. The rain thumped on the roof like the beats of a dying heart. In the sunny days that followed, I glimpsed Amanda from my office window -- dashing here, dashing there, stepping out of taxis, and chattering with girlfriends. As for me, I hardly went out. The gloom of my day-to-day subsistence resettled. The red diode of my romantic dreams, blinked once, twice, then harmonized with my surroundings, and vanished. My life was bleak. It was empty. But it was back to being mine. July 16, 1999