“Yeah.” God, I want out of there. I feel sick…can’t spend another second near this guy. “Call me if you need more.” My hands are shaking.
“I might do that.” The pot disappears in his coat. “I’m going to have some time on my hands. Have you heard? I’m leaving, too. I quit rather than be a part of this any longer.”
“No. I hadn’t heard,” I say, though I have heard, of course. And I also know that he’s really being forced out. But unlike the scores of people he slagged, M—gets to go out on his own terms, probably with a bonus. A guy like him saves the suits a few hundred grand by marching good people into the wood chipper, then gets to pretend he quit in indignation (even though he stuck around to do the layoffs first, protecting his Vichy loyalists to the end) so he can save face and go around speaking in front of college classes and journalism groups, eventually getting another job ruining some other newspaper.
M—nods, and seems to take my silence for sympathy, which I’m in no danger of actually feeling. “I’ll be okay, though,” he says. “I can always teach. And maybe there are still papers out there looking for a good old-fashioned newspaperman.”
With his last ship still listing in the bay, Queeg wants another one. I suppress a scoff.
Meanwhile M—is warming to our postwar camaraderie. “So you’re out there…in the world. What’s the job market like for old ink-stained pros like us?”
Us. “I don’t know…if you’re willing to work…there’s always something. In fact, I picked up a little freelance work today.”
He smiles wearily and I think his eyes rim with tears. “That’s great, Matt. I’m happy for you.”
I have to look away to keep the sympathy from welling up in me.
“I don’t mind telling you, I’m a little bit scared,” M—says, and tightens his scarf. “Fifty-six? And no job?” He wipes at his eyes. “What if it’s…you know, the end?”
I don’t say anything.
“Well.” He pulls the bag of weed from his coat and smells it again. “Thanks for this, Matt. I think it’s going to help.” And then he puts his pot away again and considers me seriously. “It’s too bad you and I didn’t spend more time together.”
“Well…” I twitch and shudder, glance at my glowing watch and hear myself laugh maniacally again. “Never too late to start!”
CHAPTER 23
OH-2 The Vengeful
I AM OH-2 THE VENGEFUL
Wiretapping angel of fury
Be prepared to meet your maker
Or at least a federal grand jury
The guy who talked me into refinancing last year, John Denham, no longer works for the mortgage company in the mini-mall next to the tanning salon. In fact, John’s mortgage company is no longer a mortgage company but an empty storefront—as is the tanning salon. In fact, this whole mini-mall appears to be on its way to becoming surface parking.
Mark Akenside, sly salesman who bait-and-switched us into the more expensive Maxima, also escapes CI OH-2. He no longer works for the Nissan dealer, and neither does Dodsley, his old manager, the capo who dry-sold us winter floor mats. “It’s been a bloodbath this fall,” a surviving car salesman confides, staring out at a savannah of starving sedans.
Fine. There are others. Always others. It’s Friday, so I find our old phony Aussie real estate agent, Thomas Otway, running an open house on a foothills cul de sac.
“’Ello, mite,” he says when I come into the blond-wood foyer. “I ’ope you’re ready to see the house-a-yah drimes.” He sweeps his arm toward a living room tastefully appointed in French Colonial furniture, with a grand staircase and a completely updated kitchen.
“Oh, it looks like a dream all right,” I say. And then I smile and explain that we already bought one dream from him.
“Oh?” Thomas doesn’t remember me. In fact, he doesn’t seem to register people at all, any more than a reef shark notes the kind of fish it’s eating. But he does remember the house when I describe it. “Ah, yeah. A tudah, on almost a half-acah. Go’geous home. Only drawback was the neighbah-hood school if I remembah roight.”
Oh, you remember roight.
Thomas Otway’s skin is perfect. He has longish, soap opera styled hair, light brown with crazy yellow highlights, and besides affecting more accent earlier in the sales process, he apparently frosts his locks, too, and I begin to imagine a system for determining who I’ll entrap, giving points for various crimes against humanity: Real estate, or any kind of predatory salesmanship, is four points. Fake or affected accents? Two points. Frosted hair? Four points. Right away, without even knowing if he beats his kids or fails to stop at red lights, the bastard’s at ten, which will be the threshold for incurring the wrath of CI OH-2.
No, I’m not bad at this. For one thing, it’s easier to bring the subject up than I thought it would be. The key is patience. So I let Thomas show me around the house, pretending to be interested in the lush runner carpets on the wood-floor hallways, the limited edition lithographs on the walls, the horrid Chihuly blown-glass chandelier. I think the transcribed wire in this case could be used to train other informants:
CI OH-2: It’s certainly bigger than it looks from the outside.
Suspect 2: Mite, this house has 3,600 square feet on two floors.
CI OH-2: Wow. And does that include the basement?
Suspect 2: No, bisement’s unfinished.
CI OH-2: Good, because I have big plans for the basement.
Suspect 2: Pehfect for a home gym, roight?
CI OH-2: Actually I might put a grow room down there.
Suspect 2: What? You serious?
CI OH-2: Serious as a bloody reef shark. Why, do you smoke, Thomas?
“Sure.” Thomas smiles out one side of his mouth. “I used to,” he says.
“You should try this stuff I have. It’s killer.”
Thomas stares at me for a long second before shaking off the temptation. “Nah. I’m try-ning fur a meer-athon. I’m a runnah. That stuff…bad for the lungs, roight? But listen—” He looks around, then leans in close. “I don’t suppose you can get your hands on some coceene?”
Side-note for my handlers, Randy and Lt. Reese: you have got to get me some coke.
I check my glowing watch as I drive out of the cul de sac, through the splotches in my exhausted eyes. School’s almost out. Work’s done for the day.
I never thought I’d like working in sales, but it is strangely satisfying getting people to do what you want. And I’m not just working; Randy says I’m doing something for society and maybe I am, in my way—ridding the world of parasitic, layoff-happy newspaper editors and asshole real estate agents, home-wreckers and tailgaters and people who speed on residential streets, all the phonies and villains and fuck-sticks in the world. As Righteous Randy might say, I am the Light and the Dark.
From now on I will answer every phone call from a telephone solicitor with purpose—No, I don’t need a new long distance provider, but would you like to buy a spliff? I think of the assholes I meet every week—snooty waiters and people who park in handicapped spots and all the arrogant, selfish, lying cheats. I can bring them all down, one by one.
I’ll do my homework: research the most calloused bosses, inept congressmen, corrupt bankers, greedy brokers, predatory lenders. I’ll drive my Nissan to Detroit and sell to the auto company CEOs and I’ll go to New York and sell weed to that asshole trader I heard on NPR and to the dipshit investment bankers who broke our financial system through their unchecked greed, the lousy ass-ticks who told us all to give them our money, to vote for them, to trust them, guys who said the markets would regulate themselves, that the world was fair.
I sit in revved-up silence in my car, outside the boys’ school, my own breathing deafening. Hands shake. I feel flushed. Mind racing, I’m having conversations I can’t track with myself, offering justifications and pleadings. I want to sleep, preferably next to my wife, and I wonder what she’s doing now. Sitting at her desk at the stupid optometrist’s office, s
taring into space, thinking of…him? God, I wish Chuck was a pot smoker. How much easier would that be? I happen to look up to see Elijah Fenton’s dad, Carl, walking past the line of waiting cars toward the school. The guy wears a softball jacket with the name of his paving and concrete company on it, as if he’s taunting jobless losers like me with the fact that he still has a company and that his company still has a softball team—the arrogance of the employed! No doubt made aware of my son’s unprovoked clacker aggression, Carl Fenton shoots me what can only be described as a threatening glare. Is there any way the guy really made out with the second-grade fertility goddess, Ms. Bishop? Who knows? All I know is that next week we’ll find out if Mr. Carl Fenton wants to buy a reefer. Oh, and there’s Nicholas Rowe—he of the T-Ball prodigy son, Caleb—Nick Rowe who famously cut second graders from the second-grade T-Ball team because he feared their lack of coordination might affect his son’s draft status a decade from now. (Ten point bonus, that.) A long shot, of course, but perhaps he’d like some weed.
Beyond all these deserving targets, I wonder if I can find my own eighth-grade baseball coach, Mr. Stepney, or Tina Sprat, the girl who refused to kiss me after I spent sixty dollars on dinner before a Sadie Hawkins dance my sophomore year, or the guy in college, what was his name—Yalden!—who sold me that Chevy Luv pickup with the cracked block. Or…or…
I snap awake.
Was I sleeping?
School is out.
Kids drift to waiting cars.
The doors open. Franklin and Teddy climb in the backseat.
“He-e-ey.” I try to not sound crazy but my voice goes up and down the register. I can’t stop blinking. “H-h-how was school?” Why is my voice doing that? I’m cracking. Nervous breakdown? Anxiety attack?
“Fine,” Teddy mumbles.
“Great!” says Franklin.
“Great? Really?” I turn to see Franklin’s big earnest eyes. “What happened?”
Franklin shrugs. “Nothing. It was just a great day. I love Fridays.”
I laugh again. And then a whimper, a kind of weep seeps from me, from some deep cavity. I can’t say why Franklin’s great day causes me to whimper—maybe the eight-year-old in me recalls that nothing has to happen for a day to be great. And then it feels as if this broken thing in my chest cracks like an ice dam, and begins sliding up into my throat. I happen to glance down and see the glowing watch around my wrist. Shit. I forgot to press the stop button after my meeting with M—. The voice activation has presumably kicked in.
I imagine the transcript:
CI OH-2: “He-e-ey! How was school?”
Unidentified Juvenile Male 1: (Unintelligible)
Unidentified Juvenile Male 2: “Great.”
CI OH-2: “Great? Really? What happened?”
Unidentified Juvenile Male 2: “Nothing. It was just great. I love Fridays.”
CI OH-2: (Unintelligible, possibly maniacal laugh-cry-whimper as if he’s snapping, unraveled beyond recognition)
“You okay, Dad?”
I press the wind-button on the watch. The backlight goes out. “Fine, Teddy.”
“Elijah Fenton and I are friends again,” Franklin says.
“Did you apologize to him?”
“I didn’t have to.” Franklin shrugs. “He didn’t say anything about it.”
Something parental I should say here, something about responsibility or contrition, what’s the word…the other side of forgiveness…aw hell…I can’t come up with it.
So I concentrate on the road. Drive now; parent later.
I squint. It’s cleared up again this afternoon, the cool winter fog keeps burning off, leaving no place to hide, and the crisp air throws me; the world is washed out, shimmery. Like a twenty-degree desert. Tree limbs crook accusingly in the wind, and leaves leap at our passing. I can see deep into the cars around me, and it’s like looking into people’s souls. We round the corner to our house, I’m still shaking, breathing shallow and raspy. We crawl down our block, limp into the driveway.
How is it that I keep forgetting that my front yard is full of lumber?
“Wow,” says Teddy. “What’s all the wood for?”
“That…was a mistake,” I say. “They’re coming to get it tomorrow. They delivered it to the wrong house.”
“The wrong house?” Teddy asks. “That’s too bad.”
Kid, you have no idea.
“It looks like Jenga,” says Franklin.
And this causes me to start crying again. It was Franklin’s favorite game a couple of years ago, Jenga. We played every night before I tucked him into his little bed, his feet curled up beneath him. I stare at the beams in my front yard, stacked crosswise, and it comes to me that life is a version of that children’s game: pull one from the bottom and stack it on top and try to keep the whole thing from falling. Slide a board out, stack it on top, the structure growing taller as the weight shifts upward, until the base begins to look like lattice, and pretty soon you realize you’re holding your breath, that there are no more safe moves, but still you must try, always try, because that’s the game…so you look for a board to slide, gently…slide…gently…even though you can never win, and it’s always the same…breathless and tentative…the world teetering above your head.
CHAPTER 24
You May Be Experiencing
SLURRED SPEECH, STUTTERING OR speaking in monotone
lapses in judgment and trouble with visual recognition
a loss of impulse control, dizziness, nausea and
erratic behavior, along with severe disorientation
all caused by a steep decline in neural activity
which can lead eventually to severe hallucinations
delirium, delusions, manias, even psychotic breaks—
then death—
Then death? Wait. Just like that? Shit. I reread the Wikipedia sleep deprivation article to see if I missed something. A few days without sleep and you go from slurred speech to bad decisions to…death? Well, that hardly seems fair. It feels like they left out a few steps…like they skipped second and third base…went straight from kissing to a greasy threesome. I read deeper into the article: the longest anyone has willingly gone without sleep was eleven days—some college student in 1965—but because of the health dangers, the Guinness World Records has stopped recognizing lack of sleep as a legitimate record. Meanwhile, there are all sorts of folk stories about people going years without sleep. My favorite is a guy in Vietnam who claims to have gone thirty years.
And then, there’s sleep deprivation as torture, of course. It’s one of the oldest tortures there is—relatively clean, no scars—a big hit at Gitmo. There’s an old account by former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, who was sleep deprived by KGB officers in the 1970s. He described “a haze” from which his “spirit” was “wearied to death.”
That about describes it: haze. Spirit wearied. Death.
I put my head down on the desk for a just a second to think and—
The front door opens downstairs.
I sit up. It’s dark outside. Shit, what time is it?
I hear the front door close.
Where am I? Push back from the desk.
She’s climbing the steps.
My face feels rubbery. Can’t focus.
She pauses at the office door.
She’s silhouetted: “I got your message.”
“What?” I wipe the spit from my mouth.
Voice quavering: “In the front yard?”
Groggy, I have no idea what she means. What time is it?
Her eyes are strange—unfamiliar. “For what it’s worth—”
“Do you…know what time it is?”
Her eyes shut. “When did you become cruel?”
I meant it as a question, not recrimination.
“And they’re coming to take that wood away?”
Oh, right. The wood. “Tomorrow. Look Lisa, I—”
She walks away. Our bedroom door eases shut.
Then the day comes flooding back to me…righteous Randy and nasty Reese…tree-fort wood…CI OH-2. Oh, and I have a watch! A dark, unactivated watch on my wrist! So I know the time…quarter to six. No wonder I’m disoriented; I think I’ve actually gotten an hour of sleep. I shake my head to clear the static and then walk to our closed bedroom door. I put my hand against the cool wood. So here we are. Now what?
I can’t hear anything in there. But behind that door is our bed. (So tired…) If I could just somehow get to the other side of this door, climb into that bed, and we wouldn’t have to speak, wouldn’t even have to face each other…I put my hand on the cold knob. I swear, we wouldn’t have to say a word, she could just settle in behind me, her knees nestled behind mine, and we could sleep until—
“Dad?” I turn. Franklin is wearing his art hat—a paint-splattered Angels cap that he wears whenever he breaks into his craft caddy.
“Hey pal.”
“I need to ask you something.”
“Sure.” I follow him into his bedroom. Here we go. What’s happening to you, Dad? Are you and Mom getting a divorce? Which parent will we live with?
In his fussy, cluttered bedroom, Franklin has his easel set up in the center, a big piece of butcher paper clipped to it. He’s done a crude painting of Godzilla (Franklin is working through a monsters motif in his art right now, this, a classic interpretation—scales down the back and on the tail, three claws on each heavy foot, fire coming from the gaping jaws.) On top of the painting he’s written, “To Elijah. I Am Sorry.” And on the bottom, “From Franklin.”
“I like this. It’s a nice gesture.”
But something is bothering Franklin and he looks at me with all the seriousness his earnest little face can muster.
“What is it, sport?”
“I just need to know…” He takes a deep breath. “Well…” He sighs; he’s just going to go ahead and ask his question: “Who would win in a fight? Godzilla or a tyrannosaurus?”