“Listen, Mr. Friedman—I really don’t need to know. It’s fine. Honestly. If you’ve got some honey on the side, that’s not my business. Okay?”
“A honey on the side?” the old man said, and began to laugh, more than Milo had ever heard before. Before the fit ended, Milo had begun to think that Arthur Friedman might choke to death on his own laughter. But after an interminably long period of time, he regained his composure and continued. “I can assure you, Milo, that I do not have any honey on the side. Though it may surprise you, my balding head, my expanding gut, and my flaming hemorrhoids have kept the ladies at bay for quite some time. But that doesn’t mean I can’t have a little fun from time to time, right?”
“You’re not talking about prostitutes, are you?” Milo asked, wondering where in hell a retiree might find a hooker in a small town like Wethersfield, Connecticut.
“Not prostitutes,” he said between minor aftershocks of laughter. “I’m talking about pornography, Milo. On my computer.”
Less than two weeks before, Milo had installed a new desktop computer in his client’s study, a suggestion that he made to many of his clients. A majority of them spent a great deal of time alone, some never leaving their homes except for weddings and funerals, so Milo had found that the Internet could provide these shut-ins with the ability to interact with other human beings, play games, and shop, all from the comforts and confines of their own living room. Edith Marchand, for example, now spent many an evening playing online Scrabble with opponents from around the world, and had even managed to establish a few friendships with these people through e-mail. But pornography had not been on Milo’s mind when he first taught Arthur Friedman to open a web browser.
“Porn?” Milo asked. “Are you serious? How did you manage to find that? You can’t even read the newspaper with those eyes.” Though Milo had set the computer’s resolution at the smallest possible, thus making the text on websites and other programs quite large, he was sure that it was still quite difficult for Mr. Friedman to read for any length of time. He had expected the computer to be a minor diversion and nothing more for an old man with failing eyesight.
“It wasn’t hard, kid,” Arthur said with a grin. “It may give me a headache like you wouldn’t believe, but I can still make out the print when I need to. As soon as you left, I searched for big tits in the Google and found more tits than I’ve seen in my life. Good ones too. And that was just the beginning.”
“I can imagine,” Milo said, thankful that Arthur Friedman didn’t have children to whom he would have to answer.
“There’s more sex on that Internet than you can shake a stick at. And they have videos too. I saw girls having sex with guys, girls having sex with girls. You name it and I saw it. There were even a few things that I wish I had never seen. Some of it’s free, but you have to pay for the good stuff.”
“You paid for porn?”
“Don’t worry. I did my research. I signed up for two of them websites. Less than fifty bucks a month for the both of them. Hell, I’m spending almost that much for cable every month, and that’s just for Andy Griffith reruns and Sox games. This Internet is a hell of a lot better than some black-and-white sitcoms.”
Milo was afraid to ask, but since he had brought the computer into the house and introduced his elderly client to the world of online porn, he felt he must. “So how does Viagra fit in to this?”
“What do you think? After watching all this sex, I need to relieve myself. But I’m not always properly equipped to do so. So I got myself some Viagra. My doc thinks it’s a great idea. A stress reducer, he said.”
“You told your doctor about the porn?” Milo asked, dreading the details.
“Look, Milo, you can lie to your parents and your friends and even your wife if you want, but you don’t lie to your doctor.”
“Right.”
“Do you want to see the websites that I subscribed to?” he asked.
“No, thank you,” Milo said as quickly as possible. If given half a chance, he knew that his client would revel in the opportunity to have Milo watch pornography with him each week.
“Are you sure?”
“Plenty,” Milo shot back. “And can we agree to never discuss this again?”
“You bet, kid,” Arthur Friedman had said. But that turned out to be a lie. Ever since that day more than a year ago, his client had somehow managed to inject the subject of pornography or masturbation into every one of Milo’s visits. On days like today, when Milo delivered Viagra to his client, it was especially easy.
“Want me to put that in the dishwasher?” Milo asked, gesturing to the nearly empty bowl of oatmeal. Though Milo’s job did not technically require him to act as housekeeper, he never minded helping out clients who didn’t expect it from him and appreciated his efforts.
“Thanks. What’s on tap for today?”
“Something a little different, if you don’t mind,” Milo answered. “I just came from the ophthalmologist, and I’m not supposed to strain my eyes for at least six hours. So I was wondering if you could read to me today.”
“What’s wrong with your eyes?”
“Hopefully nothing, but they’ve been dry lately. The doctor wanted to be sure that I was producing enough tears, so he ran some tests. He put some chemicals in my eyes, so I’m supposed to take it easy.”
“Well, you know how bad my eyes are,” Arthur Friedman said. “Hell, why did you bother coming over today if you knew you couldn’t read? That’s the whole reason for you coming over. You know I can’t read to you.”
While Milo knew that one of the reasons that he visited Arthur Friedman was to read to the old man, he also knew that it was the company that his client also craved. Otherwise Milo would have simply dropped off an audiobook or two each week and been done with it. “I thought I might not be able to read today, so I came prepared.” Milo extracted several sheets of neatly folded paper from the inner pocket of his jacket and handed them over to Friedman, just as conflagration once again flared in his mind. “It’s ‘The Black Cat’ by Edgar Allan Poe. A classic. And it’s a short story, so you can read it in one sitting. I copied it from the Internet and increased the font size. I thought you might be able to read it. I know we’ve tried those books with large type before, but I made this printing even bigger.”
Arthur Friedman unfolded the sheaf of paper and examined the front page. The title of the story was centered in bolded type at the top of the page. The nearly four-thousand-word story filled fifteen sheets of paper, double-sided, with the margins on each page reduced to the narrowest possible. Just to be sure that his client would be able to read the story, Milo had chosen thirty-point font, almost twice the size of a standard book set in large type, making the story look like it had been written for a child.
A legally blind child.
“Look at this,” Arthur Friedman said in near astonishment. “You said that you could make the words larger on the Internet?”
“Sort of,” Milo replied, pleased with his client’s unexpected interest in the topic. He thought that he’d be pulling teeth to get him to read the story. “I could show you how to do it if you want. But it takes up a lot of ink and paper, even for a story this short. But I could show you. That is, if you can pull yourself away from the porn for long enough.”
“Not funny,” he said, his eyes transfixed on the page. “Let’s go into living room and give this a shot, huh?”
“You head on in,” Milo said. “Let me clean up in here and I’ll be along in a second. All right?”
“Sure.”
Milo couldn’t have been more pleased. The old man hadn’t been able to read for almost a decade, and suddenly the words were jumping off the page at him. Though the extreme size of the font made it unrealistic to print longer stories and novels, he thought that he might be able to find shorter pieces like “The Black Cat” for his client to enjoy.
As Arthur Friedman exited the kitchen, Milo turned on the top burner of the stove, watched it glow
a fearsome red, and sighed with relief. In the matter of minutes, perhaps less, the viselike grip on his mind would finally be released. The pounding, incessant headache and his inability to concentrate or focus would instantly be washed away in a torrent of relief.
Conflagration was about to be satisfied at last.
chapter 4
When Milo was young, he and his father built model airplanes in their garage, though it was never Milo’s idea to spend hour upon hour in a dusty garage, gluing together bits of wood until they resembled miniature flying machines. Even at his young age, he was fully aware of the toxic chemicals involved in shellacking these fragile models and knew that there were little boys and girls in sweatshops around the world doing similar work for a paltry paycheck, so why emulate them for free?
But it was something that his father had done when he was a boy, so Milo had made allowances, knowing how much it meant to his dad.
The most troublesome part of the process was that Milo was not at all adept at building model airplanes. Lacking attention for detail when it came to things like building, he would often forgo the use of the tweezers, X-Acto knives, and grip pins that littered the workbench and would simply stick the minuscule parts together with his clumsy oversized fingers. As a result, the model would fail to meet his father’s specifications for perfection and would inevitably engender a look of disappointment.
All of this never bothered Milo much, because the process of building model airplanes was simply a means by which father and son could spend time together. Whether or not Milo ever achieved the model-building status of his father, the two of them could have found relative happiness together under that single ninety-watt bulb had it not been for Milo’s unexplainable and pressing need to snap the wooden parts of his models in two.
The planes that Milo and his father constructed were made from balsa, a lightweight wood optimal for model building because of its versatility and flexibility. Milo’s father would purchase kits for the two of them to build and they would occasionally dabble in scratch builds of their own design, but in either case, these designs invariably called for the builder to bend the balsa wood in varying degrees in order for it to take on the shape of a wing, fuselage, or tail section.
For Milo, this process seemed inexplicably wrong. Regardless of the time that was spent cutting, sanding, and treating a piece of wood, Milo found it nearly unbearable to bend the wood to the correct specifications without applying just enough additional pressure to make the wood snap in half. He couldn’t explain his need to snap it, and neither did he feel he needed to. It made perfect sense to him, and he couldn’t understand why anyone wouldn’t feel exactly the same way. To Milo, balsa was like the thin, pale sheets of ice that he would sometimes find at the end of the driveway while waiting for the school bus, the kind with no water beneath that crackled like Styrofoam when broken.
The kind of ice that was impossible not to break.
When the wood finally snapped beneath his unyielding pressure, Milo would suddenly be consumed with a sense of euphoria, the gratifying combination of satisfaction and relief. The increasing pressure on the wood seemed to build equally increasing pressure on his mind, persisting until the wood had to be broken. With its satisfying snap, Milo would shiver in delight.
Unfortunately, his father’s reaction was anything but delight. Though normally a patient man, he could not understand why his son was incapable of bending the wood without snapping it. Again and again he would demonstrate the process to Milo, modeling the technique and providing ample time for his son to practice, but as soon as he as he turned his back to affix a propeller or assemble a fuselage, his son would invariably break some piece of balsa that had required the smallest degree of bending. At the sound of the snap, his father would spin, hands balled into fists, eyes wide, lips pursed. Exclamations like “For God’s sake!” or “What in hell is wrong with you?” would follow, and Milo would invariably be shuffled over to the staining table where he could do no more damage.
There were times when Milo thought that it took all his father’s strength and self-control not to lose his temper and scream at him.
Even when it was his father who bent the balsa into place, the process still felt terribly wrong to Milo, and the thought of the pressure that the wood was under would plague his mind for days. It made model building maddening for Milo, as he struggled to find new ways to snap pieces of wood that he should have been able to bend into place with relative ease.
This phenomenon was remarkably similar to Milo’s feelings when words like conflagration took up residence in his mind. When he finally answered their call, it was like the satisfying snap of balsa in his hands.
Euphoria.
When that snap came this time, Milo’s sense of relief was greater than usual. Conflagration had proven to be an especially difficult demand, particularly now that he was living on his own. Though many of his other demands benefited from the absence of Christine, finding a means of answering the demand of a word like conflagration had proven to be more challenging than usual.
In the end, Milo had turned to the Internet to help satisfy the call, a resource that he’d started using several years before. Prior to the Internet, answering these inexplicable demands had been incredibly difficult and had required a great deal of creativity and luck. But thanks to the Google, as Arthur Friedman referred to it, solutions to even the most challenging of words could often be found.
Edgar Allan Poe had been his savior on this particular occasion.
As Milo sat in a recliner beside Arthur Friedman, drinking hot chocolate and listening to his client read the story of a black cat and its alcoholic owner, Milo reveled in the now constant, cacophonous call of conflagration, knowing it would soon be satisfied. The word was now searing his brain, the acupuncture needles heated before insertion, the intervals between words now less than ten seconds—but somehow, knowing that the moment of liberation was upon him made the pain almost bearable. Thrilling, even. The combined pressure of the word and the anticipation of fulfillment exerted itself throughout his entire body, forcing his hands to ball into fists, his toes to curl inside his sneakers, and his mouth to clench shut. He found himself unconsciously holding his breath and had to force oxygen into his lungs. All other thoughts ceased as he braced himself for the moment of release. Though he had dreaded the initial demands of the word as he did all others before it, these final moments, when relief was so close, often made the struggle seem almost worthwhile.
Thankfully, the demand for words like conflagration took up residence in Milo’s mind half a dozen times a year or less, so following the completion of today’s mission, he would likely be issued a reprieve of several weeks or even months, though on one or two occasions, the time between words had been considerably shorter. The last word to assume a place in Milo’s mind prior to conflagration had been garner, and that had been more than four months before. In that case, Milo had circumvented what he thought to be the U-boat captain’s original intent and had used James Garner, the television and movie actor, as his solution. He had learned long ago that simply asking a person to repeat the word or read it out of context would never satisfy the demand, and attempting to do this would often cause the demand to become more insistent and more painful. Instead, the word needed to come naturally, in the course of normal conversation, its ultimate significance unbeknownst to the person actually speaking the word. In the case of garner, for example, the solution had been a simple question about The Rockford Files, a crime drama that James Garner had starred in during the late 1970s, asked to the right person at the right time.
Other demands would arise in the time between words. Jelly jars. Ice cubes. Bowling. But at least these demands, as equally insistent and inexplicable as the words like conflagration, could be resolved without the assistance of others.
As the moment of conflagration approached, Milo straightened in his chair, anticipating its arrival. In Poe’s short story “The Black Cat,” the unreliable nar
rator had already gouged out the eye of his cat in a fit of alcoholic rage and, unable to bear the guilt and shame of his actions, had just hung the poor creature from a tree by the neck.
On the night of the day on which this cruel deed was done, I was aroused from sleep by the cry of fire. The curtains of my bed were in flames. The whole house was blazing. It was with great difficulty that my wife, a servant, and myself, made our escape from the conflagration. The destruction was complete.
Milo had read the story more than a dozen times before arriving at his client’s home and knew the paragraph containing conflagration by heart. Poe’s prose seemed to hum in the air as the magic word drew near, full of energy and heat, and when it finally came, the breaking of the tension, the satisfaction of the demand, the utterance of conflagration by someone other than himself, Milo sighed so audibly that Arthur Friedman stopped reading for a moment and looked up, wondering what might be wrong with his audience of one, before returning his attention to the page and finishing the story.
It turned out that Milo had done more than simply fulfill his own need by placing Poe’s story of irreconcilable guilt in his client’s hands. Arthur Friedman had given up on reading a decade ago, the small print taking too great a toll on his aging eyes. But the ability to increase the font size of text thrilled the man, and before Milo left for home, Friedman insisted that he deliver a quick lesson on the magic of cut and paste. As Milo prepared to leave the house, Arthur Friedman was printing out a Raymond Chandler story and was already reading the first page of thirty-six-point font.
Better than porn, Milo thought, though he knew that his client probably would disagree. He was feeling good about himself, confident that he had made a difference in the old man’s life while finally ridding himself of conflagration.
Perhaps this new sense of purpose would make up for the guilt that he continued to feel about watching Freckles’s tapes, and the knowledge that despite his guilt, he would be watching them again soon. By spending a little extra time with Arthur Friedman, perhaps he could get the universe to forgive his indiscretion when it came to Freckles. He only hoped that the extra fifteen minutes with his client wouldn’t make him late for his first session of couples’ therapy.