Pogatchnik had made plenty of threats, but this time was different. Never mind the irony that in the olden days at Knack less-than-handy Randy had been a notoriously unpunctual sick-out artist himself; the game was up.
In recognizing that this fat, freckled erstwhile employee was not vulnerable to persuasion, Shep dropped his shoulders. His back straightened, and his body realigned into such a relaxed, symmetrical pose that he might have passed for a yoga master. His mouth drifted into a fatalistic smile. He looked serene. Jackson thought he understood. When you’ve been afraid of something for long enough and then it comes to pass, the terrible thing is a release. You embrace it. You’re glad of the badness. For in the belly of the badness there is no more fear. You cannot dread what has already happened.
As Shep logged off his terminal and crossed the room to retrieve an empty stationery carton, his bearing returned to that of the man whom Jackson used to revere and whom he’d made sometimes embarrassingly obvious efforts to emulate. At last the guy moved with smooth assurance and not like a groveling toady. Cool Hand Luke was back. Jackson hadn’t realized how much he’d miss this man: powerful, competent, and stalwart. A man you could count on—who would never let your pets starve or your houseplants die while you were on vacation, who would never misplace the spare keys to your house. Who wouldn’t bat an eye at extending a loan to a pal, be that five bucks or five thousand. Who wouldn’t keep track. Who wouldn’t expect it back. A reliable, generous man of the sort now an endangered species in this country, where everyone had a hand out, and therefore naturally prone to being taken advantage of by all and sundry. A man who pursued one eccentric hobby that most people considered ridiculous, but that it behooved Jackson to regard as endearing, for Shep Knacker’s fruitcake fountains burbled a few wellsprings of whimsy into a life otherwise austerely pragmatic. A man who for all his kindness and hard work had asked for only one thing in the end, really: to be let go. Since, like it or not, he’d now got what he’d wished for, it was a goddamned shame that the timing was so piss-poor.
Glowering from his doorway, Pogatchnik looked strangely unsatisfied, having registered the corollary of a dread fulfilled: when you got a really fun thing over with, you could no longer look forward to it. Meanwhile, Shep strolled through the cubicles making good-humored remarks to his co-workers, shaking hands, gripping the odd shoulder, giving forearms a reassuring pat. Despite the zany beachcomber attire, any stranger scanning this room would immediately assume that the forceful, authoritative character in the Hawaiian print was the boss. Well, he was. That’s what Pogatchnik could never bear, and that’s why Shep had been fired. Whatever the law, Shep was still the boss and he always had been, while Pogatchnik had the soul of a peon, and even sacking Knacker would never change that.
Thanks to Pogatchnik’s ban on “personal paraphernalia,” Shep didn’t have to untape a collage of family snapshots, and the clearing off was brief. Coat over one arm, carton under the other, Shep surveyed the office at the door.
The website designer shouted, “Yo, Knacker, left something behind, didn’t you?”
Shep raised his eyebrows.
“Your fucking company, man!”
Squelched at first, a seditious laugh rippled through the staff. The accountant cried, “Yeah, take me with you!”
Jackson had taken his exclusion from Shep’s round of goodbyes as a compliment; he wouldn’t have wanted to be one more co-worker. “Let me give you a hand with that,” he said.
Though Shep could handle the single carton on his own, he said, “Thanks,” and they left together.
They walked in silence to deposit the box in Shep’s car. “I had to sell Glynis’s Golf,” Shep remarked mildly, closing the trunk. “Fortunately, she hasn’t noticed yet.”
“She still thinks she’s going back to driving it?”
“Probably. Or I don’t know what she thinks.”
“Living in her own reality the way she’s been,” said Jackson. “Not facing the music. Must make it, for you—kind of lonely.”
“Yeah,” Shep said appreciatively. “You could say that. Listen, you’d better get back. Don’t want to get sacked, too. You know he’d leap at the chance.”
“Let him. You can’t imagine that I’m gonna keep working there, with you gone.”
“You might surprise yourself. Bills to pay. Don’t think you have to do anything dramatic on my account.”
“Don’t worry,” said Jackson. “If I do anything dramatic, it’ll be on my own account.”
Funny, the resolve didn’t manifest itself all at once. No light went on—or out. Neither his mind nor his humor took a sharp turn south. But it was right around the point that Jackson could not picture toiling in that stultifying cubicle one more afternoon, and could not picture earnestly applying to toil in any other cubicle either, that what had for some months now been a resort—a theoretical island of respite in his head not so different from Shep’s, his own private Pemba—began to solidify into a land mass to which he might actually travel. Because this blank he drew, it wasn’t from a failure of imagination or even a refusal, à la Glynis, to face the music. It was not denial, but recognition: that he could not conjure an image of himself slogging once more through the paces of meaningless employ, numbly poking his head above the soil as one more perennial in the government’s crops of citizenry, because he would not. That was not what was going to happen.
“I think,” Jackson announced lightly, “this is a personal day.”
Shep shrugged. “How about a walk, then? Prospect Park, for old times’ sake. Since from now on I don’t seem to have anything but personal days.”
“Only if you put on that coat. Just looking at you makes me cold.” Shep dutifully pulled on the sheepskin. “Pants, too,” Jackson chided.
Shep looked down at his bare legs and grinned. “I don’t think so. Something about this getup suits my mood.”
“You look like a nut.”
“That’s what I mean.”
So they launched down Seventh Avenue. That was the next moment, the juncture at which his hitherto hazy mental Pemba sharpened another increment, as if focused in the viewfinder of a point-and-shoot throw-away camera: when he realized with certainty that this was the last walk. That they were rounding onto Ninth Street together for the last time.
“So—how are you?” Shep asked, with the same emphatic inflection that Ruby had used in her sister’s hospital room.
Jackson took a moment and did seriously consider spilling his guts—about the debts, about having already defaulted on the minimums for one Visa and a Discover card. About the surgery, the infection, the ham-handed reconstructions that just made everything worse. About the revelation on Union Street that apparently he could not even pay a woman to have sex with him. But it felt too late and it would take too long. More to the point, at the end of any confidential outpouring, nothing would have changed. Chances were, of course, that it would all come out in the end, but that was acceptable. It would give them all something to talk about, and they would need topics; they would need reasons. These weren’t really the reasons, but the explanation would be tidy and they would cling to it. As for the real reason, Jackson couldn’t be bothered to formulate it, since one of the many appetites of which he felt himself letting go was any desire to be understood; gloriously, today’s Get Out of Therapy Free card also exempted him from any obligation to understand himself.
Nevertheless, he did not want to keep hurtfully shutting Shep out, so he confided out of kindness. “Flicka’s falling apart. That being inevitable is no help. My marriage is falling apart, and that not being inevitable—does that make it evitable, is that a word? Well, the evitability is no help, either.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. What’s happened?”
Jackson tried to speak honestly but to keep it short. Shep was the one with the real problems right now, and he shouldn’t be selfish. In fact, presented with the cheerful immanence of the very sort of permanent vacation that Shep had planne
d for years, and no longer gazing at his own private Pemba from a distance but coming to view the foreshortened present from the perspective of the island itself, Jackson felt truly and deeply unselfish for perhaps the first time in his life. “The truth is, I never felt I deserved her. She’s so good-looking, and really capable at everything she turns her hand to, whether it’s landscaping or IBM or adjusting to the curse of a kid with a condition so rare that only three hundred and fifty other people in the world have it, too. And she’s so, well, good. But I guess she finally came around to my way of seeing things. Now she doesn’t think I deserve her, either.”
Maybe it was the calm, philosophical tone that Jackson had assumed, the uninvested flippancy of that last line, but Shep turned and looked hard at his friend and seemed disturbed by what he saw, or disturbed by what he could not discern, and he said nothing.
As they entered the park, Jackson was reminded of their conversation strolling this circuit about a year ago, a chill ramble during which Shep had vowed not to buy Glynis “turkey-burger medical care;” now the guy had gone and bought top-shelf, aged-Angus-crown-rib-roast medical care, and Glynis was still going to croak. Another happy advent that Jackson was now planning to skip. The opt-out didn’t strike him as cowardly, but as sensible. Why, the miseries that he soon planned to escape were too numerous to list: Flicka checking out; maybe Carol getting cancer, too; Heather ballooning even bigger and not being able to find a boyfriend; the unpleasant scene in which he came clean to Carol about the debts because a For Sale by Lender sign was about to be planted outside their house; not to mention the hurricanes, crop failures, stock crashes, and civil wars that the rest of the world pissed down on you just for getting out of bed in the morning. Good fortune being mostly about dodging bad fortune, that made him presently one of the luckiest guys on the planet.
Jackson was waiting for Shep to raise the matter of his rudely cancelled health insurance. Instead he talked about his father.
“I’ve felt bad about not visiting him,” he said. “Not being able to come near him with this c-diff thing because of Glynis. They can’t seem to kill it off. Round and round of antibiotics. Afraid I lost my temper with one of the nurses on the phone a few weeks ago. But get this: when I groused about how their outfit obviously has some cleanliness issues, and if they’d only start washing their hands? She laughed. She told me that, in lab experiments? If you put c-diff bacteria in a Petri dish with this violent disinfectant they use, it grows.”
“That shit multiplies in the stuff they use to kill it? Man, you gotta admire an organism that determined. Lotta people think someday the human race’ll be replaced by some higher, more evolved life form. Me, I figure the future belongs to the tiny and mindless. Few thousand years from now, Earth’s gonna be crusted solid with nothing but rhinoviruses, head lice, mildew, and streptococcus.”
“You sound like you’re looking forward to it.”
“I am,” said Jackson. “Immensely.”
“Dad’s lost more weight, they say, and he can’t afford to. But the last two or three phone calls, what’s knocked me out isn’t just that he sounds so weak. He says he no longer believes in God.”
“Not possible,” said Jackson. “It’s just a bad patch, or he’s pulling your leg.”
“He’s totally serious. He says the closer he gets to the end the more he can see—that there’s nothing to see. He says he doesn’t know what took him so long, since it’s so simple, but when you die, you die. And he says that after he’s been a faithful Presbyterian minister for all these years and then he’s allowed to suffer months of humiliation—lying in liquefied feces, having his privates roughed up by an irritable overweight nurse from Ghana with a cold wet sponge, well—there just can’t be anyone out there. He says it’s what a lot of his parishioners tried to tell him when a kid died or they came out the other side of an auto accident a drooling paraplegic and he wouldn’t listen, but now he gets it.”
“Wow. That’s actually pretty sophisticated.”
“I thought it was horrible.”
Jackson stopped and turned. “I thought you didn’t buy into that Christian malarkey.”
“I don’t especially. I mean, I don’t. It’s a pretty good story, but too fancy for me—all that son of God and virgin birth stuff. And any religion that claims our one species, on this one planet, circling this one star, just happens to be the whole purpose of the universe, the be-all and end-all—well, it’s suspect, isn’t it? When you look up at the sky, with everything else out there? It’s self-serving and, on a statistical level, plain unlikely. Also, some of the things I’ve seen in these really poor, scraping countries that Glynis and I have traveled to: open sewers, running sores, little kids going blind from parasites in the water … It doesn’t make you think there’s anyone up there in control—or at least not anyone decent. Still, Dad’s believing has always made it relaxing for me not to. If I think there’s nothing and he thinks there’s nothing, too … I don’t know. Suddenly it’s all a little chilling. In fact, I’ve found myself in a weird position. I feel like what I should really be doing, if I care about him? Is trying to talk him back into believing something I don’t. Like I should be reading him scripture from the Book of Job. Belting out ‘Bringing in the Sheaves’ on the phone. Because I’ve found these conversations incredibly depressing. Christ, I thought people were supposed to find religion when they were afraid of dying.”
“Glynis hasn’t.”
“She’s too perverse. Even if she saw the light, she’d pretend she hadn’t, if only to spite her sister. Besides, she’s so convinced she isn’t dying that she refuses to even be afraid of it.”
“If willpower has anything to do with it, Glynis will live to a hundred.”
“Do you believe in an afterlife? Other people’s kind—small A.”
“Nah,” said Jackson. “Besides, I don’t want one. I mean, who would want more of this?”
“I think the idea is there’s no mesothelioma or Handiman-dot-com.”
“Even so. I just get tired, man.”
“Of what?”
“Everything, man. Fucking everything.”
Shep shot him another one of those looks.
They passed the corral, where a young woman was walking a horse that looked cold. She side-eyed the guy in the sheepskin coat and Bermuda shorts, but may have been comforted that at least the stocky guy walking alongside looked halfway normal. Yet mostly Prospect was deserted, its branches bared claws, its gruel of a sky lumpy and congealed. The tarmac of the perimeter roadway was mottled with salt, while on the verge clumps of hard black ice were evaporating to gradually reveal their chunks of frozen dog shit. The city shouldn’t even have parks in the winter, really. They were just wrong.
Shep’s delivery was as gray and stark as the landscape: “I may have to declare bankruptcy.”
Until now, Jackson had been sliding into a nice coasting elegiac apathy, such an anesthetic rising-above that he could see their two figures rounding the bend by the Fifteenth Street exit as if levitating from overhead. But Shep’s revelation dropped him butt first on the pavement. “Whoa, you’re kidding! After all that money you got for Knack?”
“Forty percent co-insurance. My dad. Amelia’s premiums … Meanwhile, I’ve sold everything I can shed on eBay: Glynis’s car, my fishing tackle, my record collection; came close to selling the Wedding Fountain, but I was afraid it would just get melted down for the silver, and in the end I couldn’t do it. All that amounted to spare change, anyway; barely covered one blood test and a PET scan. Especially after capital gains, turns out you were right all along. I wasn’t rich. A million dollars isn’t that much money.”
“Does it make any difference if—if Glynis … ?”
Gently, Shep took the thought from him, in a gesture of almost physical generosity, like lifting that carton of chattel from Handy Randy from Jackson’s arms at the car. “If she dies sooner? Yeah, that might spare me. And, sure, I’ve thought of that. Couldn’t help it. This
practicality of mine, you know, it can be a curse. You can’t imagine how awful that is, to think thoughts like that.”
“But wouldn’t it be better for her, too, at the end of the day?”
“What are you suggesting, I should smother her with a pillow? It’s not my business to conclude that for her. She’s hanging on. With a fistful of pills every hour, and tiny pureed meals whenever I can force them down her, she’s hanging on. So I have to assume she wants to. Still, even one more month, with no insurance, and I’m wiped out. Worse than wiped out. Up to my neck in red ink, and now I don’t even have a salary.”
“You’ll probably get severance.”
“It’ll just go to creditors.”
“Well, maybe going broke is okay, then. See this thing with Glynis through, let the bills pile up, then file the papers. Draw a line. Start fresh. That’s what bankruptcy is for.” Whimsically, Jackson entertained the same solution to his own debts, then dismissed the idea. Not because of the ignominy. It was too much trouble.
“I’ve always kept up my end of things,” said Shep. “You’ve ragged on me for letting people like Beryl take advantage, but I’ve never cared about that. I care about holding my head high, being someone other people can depend on. Now I’ll be just another deadbeat, like everybody else.”
Yet Jackson’s initial burst of disgust on his friend’s account had already sloughed to boredom. He would have called Shepherd Knacker’s fiscal disgrace an injustice if he were still interested, but he wasn’t. Funny, the high-octane mix of emotions that had fueled his whole adult life—outrage, consternation, and contempt—appeared to have abruptly run out like a tank of gas. He would have liked, of course, to foment on Shep’s behalf, if only, like this ritual shuffle around Prospect Park, for old times’ sake. But he couldn’t have worked up a proper tirade with a gun to his head.
They walked the full four-mile circuit this time, during the last long rise keeping their own counsel. When they returned to Shep’s car, Jackson wanted to impart something wise and memorable, but he couldn’t think of anything besides “Take care of yourself,” since somebody would have to. Still, though they’d never been big on clutching and pawing, after an awkward dawdle by the driver’s door Jackson reached out and embraced his best friend hard and for a long time. Once they’d separated and Jackson waved before turning to hunch down the avenue he thought that a good hug had been the ticket, really. Better than being clever.