Louis looked up at the TV screen to see a baseball sailing into the visitors’ bullpen at Fenway. The Sox lead had been cut in half. In the kitchen, the telephone rang.
It was Eileen. Nearly a week had passed since Louis had left a string of increasingly sarcastic messages on her machine, but she was not apologetic. She just wanted to say that she and Peter were having a big party at Peter’s on the twenty-eighth. “It’s a disaster-theme party” she said. “You have to wear a costume to get in, OK? You have to. And it has to have something to do with disasters. It won’t be any fun if people don’t dress up, so you really have to.”
Louis was looking down at yesterday’s Globe, which he’d dropped on the outgoing stack after relieving it of its comics. Plain as day the headline on page one: Quake Aftermath: Large Chemical Spill in Peabody.
“Just come, all right?” Eileen said. “You can bring people if you want to, but they have to have a costume too. Let me give you the address.”
Louis took the address. “Why do you want me at this party?”
“Don’t you want to come?”
“Oh, definitely maybe. Just I’m not sure why you happened to invite me.”
“’Cause it’s going to be a lot of fun and lots of people are coming.”
“Are you saying you enjoy my company?”
“Look, if you don’t want to come, don’t come. But I have to get off now, OK? So I’ll see you on the twenty-eighth, maybe.”
According to the Globe, the greenish effluent had first been noticed by residents of a Peabody subdivision on Monday morning, eighteen hours after Sunday’s earthquake fourteen miles to the northeast. A four-year-old boy and his two-year-old sister were playing by a swale adjacent to the subdivision and returned home with “a substance resembling Prestone antifreeze” on their clothing. In the course of the afternoon, homeowners observed that the swale, still filled with runoff from recent heavy rains, was turning green. A cloying organic odor, “like magic marker,” was noticed. As of Wednesday evening the odor had largely dissipated. State environmental officials had so far not succeeded in isolating the source of the effluent but were focusing their investigation on a fenced and wooded property owned by Sweeting-Aldren Industries, and an adjacent five-acre wetland drained by the polluted swale. Ridgely Holbine of Sweeting-Aldren repeated his claim that the company had not discharged significant quantities of industrial waste in Peabody for nearly twenty years. He said the property in question housed a milling facility and a number of small holding tanks for “intermediate processes,” none of which showed any signs of earthquake damage. Meanwhile one Peabody resident, Doris Mulcahey, told reporters that her husband and eldest daughter had both died of leukemia within the last seven years, and that she had not been aware until now that the wooded property four hundred yards from her home belonged to Sweeting-Aldren. “I’m not saying they caused it,” Mulcahey said. “But I sure as heck don’t rule it out.”
The ball game ended sadly for Sox fans.
Early the next morning, moments before his alarm would have rung, Louis had his dream again. A door in the Bowleses’ house on Dryden Street had led him back into the room with the red leather chairs, and here he found that in all these days his mother had not gone anywhere. She was still perched on a chair, the hem of her yellow dress still raised almost to her hips. But now there was only one man in the room. Louis recognized him from the painting above the fireplace. The neat, bald skull, the lusting black eyes. Catching sight of Louis, he at once turned away and did something to his pants, adjusted something in front. This was when Louis realized that the entire room was slick with semen, greenish white semen deep enough to cover the soles of his shoes, and he woke up quaking violently. He succeeded in not examining this dream later on, though he did not quite forget it either.
Birds were awakening while he ate his Cheerios. As happened every morning, when he passed by his roommate Toby’s beige furniture ensembles—the big sofa and chairs emerging from the unpeopled night into another day of being stationary, of being big, of weighing a lot and occupying volume—his sense of the unreality of life hit a sharp peak.
The time it took him to drive to work, down the Alewife Brook Parkway and onto Route 2 past the Haiku Palace Chinese Restaurant and the Susse Chalet motel, up the mile-long grade which every day two or three unfit automobiles failed to make, and out through historical suburbs where the strengthening light made the headlights of eastbound cars and semis seem funereal, was the same amount of time his juice and coffee needed to percolate down through kidneys and bladder and send him straight to the men’s room at WSNE. Alec Bressler was shaving at the mirror, his decrepit kit bag balanced on the sink. “You spent the night here again,” Louis observed, peeing.
Alec palpated his blue neck. “Mm—hm!”
At the studio board Louis sat down with a chocolate cruller purchased from Dan Drexel and glanced over the log printout for the six-to-seven slot. Drexel, using his palm to ram a 150-degree arc of doughnut into his mouth, changed places in the booth with the night announcer and read through his copy of the printout. There would be powdered sugar in Drexel’s lumberjack beard until his bathroom break at eight. (To the listener, few radio announcers sound bearded. But many radio announcers are.) Louis loaded Cart 1 with a 30-second Cumberland Farms spot, let it roll at 5:59:30, and cued Drexel. Morning Rush Hour News with a Twist began.
They were in the midst of a Bob Newhart Festival. “We’re playing every comedy recording,” Drexel reminded the audience, “that the Button-Down Mind ever made and WSNE ever purchased. In just one moment we’ll hear what must be an all-time favorite Newhart act, but first a roundup of world news.”
Louis cued up the fourth cut on Side Two of Behind the Button-Down Mind while Davidson Chevy-Geo talked financing.
“You have sugar in your beard,” he told Drexel.
As always, Drexel brushed at the wrong spot. The ad was ending, and he cozied up to the boom mike with a lusting cat’s unconscious simper. “Nineteen sixty-three,” he crooned. “And the Button-Down Mind takes on the surprising world of children’s TV.” On the word “TV” his pointing finger came to rest on Louis, who removed his thumb from the turntable and let it spin.
Four hours later the talk-show announcer Kim Alexander took over the studio board. Outside in the midmoming sun, Louis sat down by a willow tree on part of the grassy expanse that made the Crossroads Office Park a park. The lawn was one of those familiar suburban places where the concrete of the enclosing curbs hasn’t lost its white film of lime yet, and the agreeably nose-curdling smell of junipers hangs heavy, and there’s no litter, not even cigarette filters (or maybe one single piece of artful litter, in the Japanese style), and no one, but no one, ever picnics. Louis didn’t understand these spaces. Why astroturf and plastic trees weren’t used instead.
He watched a new Lincoln Town Car with smoked side windows round the cul-de-sac and ease to a stop opposite the WSNE entrance to Building III. Its vanity plate read: PROLIFE 7. Libby Quinn debouched from the passenger side and hurried into the studios. The Lincoln’s engine surged like a powerful man sighing: PROLIFE 7. Louis shrugged and lay back on the warm new grass, letting the sun saturate his optic nerves with orangeness.
It can make a person dizzy to lie in hot sun. For several seconds he thought the funny thing happening to him was due to a loose wire in his nervous system, some spazzing synapse, and not, as the chorus of car alarms from the parking lot suddenly indicated was the case, to an earthquake.
He lost several seconds scrambling to his feet. By the time he was upright the event was ending, the ground now moving almost imperceptibly, like a diving board when a person stands motionless at the very end of it, above a swimming pool.
Traffic on 128 was unruffled. Louis looked challengingly at the air around him, as though daring the physical world to do that again when his back wasn’t turned, just daring it. But the only disturbance remaining was the marginal instability of his own body, the swaying of leg
s through which blood was being pumped with less than perfect smoothness (even great mimes and palace guards can’t be statues). The ground itself was still.
Inside, as he approached Alec’s office, he heard the owner quarreling with Libby in the inner sanctum. Someone less attracted to fights might have retreated, but Louis stationed himself on the threshold of the outer office, which contained a ten-inch black-and-white Zenith and a sofa with folded bedding and unironed shirts on the armrest.
“I won’t return this man’s calls,” Alec said. “I refuse to know this man. But my station manager has breakfast with him? My station manager who I told, no, we don’t deal with this type person? I understand he’s a very good-looking young man. Very moral, very char-is-ma-tic. It compromises you to have lunch, yes, or cocktails, or dinner. But breakfast—is a very moral meal!”
“Closing your eyes won’t make him go away, Alec. Not unless you can also find a couple hundred thousand dollars to buy him off with. He’s already filed the challenge.”
“So? Last time we renewed—”
“The last time we renewed, nobody challenged it and the station wasn’t gutted.”
“They don’t take away licenses so easily.”
“Plus Philip Stites hadn’t paid Ford & Rothman to study our audience.”
“So—blackmail! A very moral sing!”
“Face it. He wants a station.”
“And you’re going to work for this man? You’re going to be his station manager?”
“When you won’t let me collect on dead accounts? When all you can broadcast during drive hours is Somalian war news and Phyllis Diller?”
“People love Phyllis Diller!”
“One point seven percent at 8 a.m. That’s the March figure. I think it speaks for itself.”
“OK, we do some local noose. We do the war on drugs. We do airplane crashes. OK. All-new programming, as of today. We tell FCC, new programming, very noose-oriented—”
“Alec, there’s nobody to do the news, besides me.”
“Maybe we get Slidowsky back—”
“You know very well what I think of that girl.”
“I can do it. Louis can do it. We listen to the other stations and copy it down. We can hire a student, I can sell—”
“What can you sell?”
“I sell my car. When do I use this car? I don’t need this car.”
“I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.”
“But sink about it. Libby. Sink about it. I sell my station to Philip Stites, against my principles. Do you respect me for this?”
“I respect a man who does the responsible thing. And I think the responsible thing to do here is sell the station while you still might come out in the black.”
Alec muttered something vaguely, something about sinking. “Do you need me?” Libby said to Louis, coming through the outer office.
Louis assumed a preoccupied air. “You feel the earthquake?”
She patted her bun and smiled demurely. “I guess I didn’t.”
“Ersequake?” Alec wore the expression of metaphysical amusement that came from sucking a nicotine lozenge. “Just now?”
“Yes. You feel it?”
“No . . . I was busy.” He beckoned Louis into his sanctum, where two cigarettes of different lengths were burning in a heaping ashtray. His shortwave was set up by the window, and along the wall were piled packing cartons. It was beginning to appear that these rooms were the only place he had to live.
“Two things,” he said. “Sit please. First thing, I thought again—is maybe not so bad to do those collections. If they won’t pay immediately, say we settle for half if they pay right away. It must be right away.” He selected the shorter of the burning cigarettes, killed it, and drew on the longer one, still rotating the lozenge in his mouth. “Other thing: honest answer. Do employees respect a boss who smokes?”
“Sure. Why not?”
“They appear weak. Smokers.”
“Are you talking about me or about Libby?”
Alec did a foreign thing with his upper lip, curling it like a vampire about to bite, behind a veil of smoke. “Libby.”
“I’m sure she respects you. Why wouldn’t she?”
Alec nodded very slowly, lip still drawn, eyes on an odd corner of the room. “Do those collections,” he said.
Louis returned to his cubicle and reopened the files, but his first call was to the Harvard University switchboard. After one ring he was speaking to Howard Chun, who with an unpromising grunt went to try to find Renée Seitchek. When her voice came over the line she sounded neither surprised nor pleased.
“I felt the earthquake,” Louis said.
“Uh-huh. So did we.”
“Where was it? How big?”
“Outside Peabody, smaller than Sunday’s. This we get from the radio, incidentally.”
“The reason I’m calling is to see if you want to go to a party my sister is giving on the twenty-eighth. Not that this is an idea I personally endorse, but supposedly it’s an earthquake-oriented party. A costume party. Will it be fun, I have no idea. But that’s what I’m calling for.”
He bent his head and listened extra-closely to what came out of the receiver.
“The twenty-eighth.”
“Yes.”
“Well—OK. But I’m not going to wear any costume.”
He released his breath, which he’d been holding. “Let me suggest that you wear some token costume. Like maybe a Band-Aid. Not that I personally—”
“All right. I’ll wear a token costume. Where’s this party going to be?”
He arranged to pick her up in his car. It turned out that she lived in Somerville herself. She gave him her home telephone number and said it was better not to call her at work. He hung up with a bad taste in his mouth, feeling unwanted.
A week of uneasiness ensued. After a couple of lucky collections Louis had begun to run into stonewalling receptionists, dilatory assistants, and a few outright ogres. He was also having trouble finding funds for postage. Once he’d exhausted the little caches of one-and two-and five-cent stamps from various abandoned desks, he had to draw on petty cash, which was kept in the owner’s wallet.
More and more often Alec could be found watching the little Zenith in his office. At dinnertime, alone or not, he provided running oral glosses on TV news and advertising; otherwise he liked to watch Westerns and war films.
“TV noose and noosepapers,” he told Louis, “are the enemy. For eight years we had a U.S. President with subnormal intelligence. Every day he does horrible harm to language, the future, the truth. Every single sinking person in the country knows this, except not the networks and noosepapers. Is suspicious, no? Or is maybe Stupid People now also minority group we don’t say bad things about? Let’s go all the way, let’s have a retarded President. And noose conference, and President is bellowing and drooling, and his advisers say, he has interesting new program, and CBS says, the President drooled tonight, and we have five analysts here to talk about his interesting new program and also perhaps about is he drooling less than last time? And New York Times prints a transcript of noose conference, is all drool drool bellow bellow, also one coherent sentence, and on page one they print the one coherent sentence! I guess they don’t want to offend retarded people by saying is bad to have a retarded President.
“Still, OK, fine, is their prerogative. But isn’t it the responsibility also of every sinking person in the country to say to networks and noosepapers: You are my enemy now. You betrayed me. You are not really on my side. You are on side of money and I see through you now and is the end. No more! You are out! I’ll find a good magazine and radio station, sank you!
“But it’s a horrible venal world. Sinking people—artists and intellectuals, the good reporters—must write for Times and talk to CBS, otherwise their enemies will. And so with blackmail the big noose media buy writers and intellectuals. Personally the media don’t give a fuck, Louis, they don’t give a fuck about truth. They??
?re just businesses that must always be making money, never stop making money and never offend any group."
“Now Mr. Pro-Life wants to buy my station because not enough people listen. Am I angry? Yes I am angry. But not politically angry. I will not say, ‘I disagree with these people’s politics.’ Because all politics is the same. Left, right, is the same! Exactly the same! But noosepapers must have readers and networks must have viewers, and without politics everyone could see this emperor of culture has no clothes on, so everything is politics! The far right gets nowhere if the media talk about what is beautiful and what is true and what is just, instead of what is politically feasible. The far right is not beautiful and not true and not just. Is their very good fortune only to be looked at politically . . .”
Though he was paid for only eight hours, Louis seldom left Waltham before six in the evening. He was surprised, one night at the end of the week, to find Libby Quinn sitting on the sofa in the TV room, breathing Alec’s smoke. Usually at this hour Libby was home with her daughters.
“Louis,” Alec said in greeting. “We have special programming tonight. A portrait of the man who—”
“Sh, sh, sh, sh, sh,” Libby said.
“I was just going to tell Louis—”
Louis ignored him. He was transfixed by the television. It drew him closer. He turned it up loud.
“We’re talking about a building,” the image of dr. renee seitchek said, “that was condemned three years ago by the Chelsea city manager and that’s sitting on completely unconsolidated landfill. It’s hard to imagine a building more prone to damage in an earthquake, and to me it’s just insanity to allow 250 church members to be living in it, even if every one of them signed a waiver.”