I never want to see that fucking clipping again. I was outraged at my mom for keeping it. What kind of psycho would do that? She didn’t show it to me but there it was, in the drawer where we kept the scissors and envelopes and clippings. From the local paper, a picture of the car, crushed, under the headline: YOUNG MAN DIES WHEN SEMI SPEEDS OVER CAR. I never thought I’d see a picture. I didn’t know there was a picture. It had been three months and I was sleeping normally again and was visiting Mom in Memphis and found the clipping. I read the article, folded lengthwise and ripped, not cut, at first not even knowing it was Jack. For a few paragraphs it was just a chilling and pathetic story—some poor man had been killed when he’d been driving too slow. A truck traveling too fast had overcome the man’s car, had driven over it, crushing it in a fraction of a second. The picture was clear, the car right there, fender to fender, but yet it was only an abstraction of a car, an angry scribble of a car, and when the clipping was unfolded there was Jack, his high school graduation picture, sportcoat over his right shoulder, the picture right next to the trucker’s, like they were a team, like the quarterback who won the game and the receiver who caught the pass.
“I just thought,” the librarian will say in a curt, professional way, “that you should see this.”
I know this file, but I have no need to see it now. I didn’t ask for this goddamn file. I tell her this.
“Yes,” she says, “but I really thought you should see this again. We felt it was important for you to pore over the file right now, replaying the episode in your mind for the next few hours.”
I look at the file, and its contents scream at me in a voice containing thousands of murders in unclean homes. I push it back toward the staffer.
“I looked at it. Thank you.”
She leaves. I look out at the meadow and see a scattering of birds chasing each other. I can see for maybe thirty miles.
There’s another tug at my sleeve. It’s another staff member, a young man with eyes like animals on fire. He’s leaning over the desk and he has a file. It’s the same file the previous librarian had.
“I just looked at that,” I say.
“Yes, but the feeling downstairs is that you haven’t examined it closely enough. Especially the part with Nigel, the prick from the funeral home, and all Jack’s college friends laughing and smoking out on the deck on the day of the service.”
I picture what I’d say to those imbeciles if I saw them again. I wanted to act and wanted something that would cause them pain and embarrassment but wanted it to happen quietly. Everything quietly. My tolerance for anything loud had diminished every year I’d lived, and now so many things gave me a jump. The steady noise at work, drills and saws—I couldn’t do it anymore, this noise. Before I quit I’d begun to ask for the quieter tasks. Painting walls and moldings, installing doors, though I maintained an option for the tearing down of ceilings—usually the acoustic tile of officed areas—and the digging up of floors. I loved doing both. So many good wood floors covered by layers and layers of indefensible surfaces—fake linoleum, particle board, rubber, carpet, cement, anything. I loved to pry under these things to find the original floor, the floor of parallel and interlocking tongue-in-groove fir planks, to uncover them, run my rough palms over their soft wood and sand them, and finish them again—to start over with this original smooth floor. And the ceilings were just as satisfying, slipping those hideous tiles, dotted like starry skies inverted, from their grids, dropping them to the floor, watching them break. Then the tearing down of the grids—so easy!—that held the tiles overhead, revealing a ceiling many feet higher, huge wooden beams old and full of the lines and curves of growth and struggle. I loved the effect when both happened in the same space: the raising of a ceiling, the lowering of a floor, exposing the wood again above and below, the space growing, the usable space and air attendant swelling within immovable walls. I thought of that painting in my boss’s office, on a calendar his daughter had given him, a Callibotte, men bent over a wood floor, the sun whitening them, the men in that one painting bent over, kneeling and sanding the whitened wood floors in that second-story room in what must be Paris—
I’m on a happy thought trail, hard-won, when another young woman, hairless and white with eyes burning black and red, appears on the other side of my desk. Now there are two staffers, flanking me, both pointing to the same material. She has the same file—WHEN SEMI SPEEDS OVER CAR—I was just looking at and had managed to forget. She sees my alarm.
“What the hell is this?” I ask.
“We made copies,” she says.
I turned on the TV. The State of the Union, a rebroadcast on cable. I pushed my ear into the pillow. The president had burst into the hall and everyone was so happy. They all seemed so genuinely mirthful, all of them. What is the president whispering to them? Most of the people just stand and clap, but some get the president whispering to them, something really great. These people, in their suits and ties, the women all wearing their bright, solid-color outfits, like a loosely distributed bunch of giant fruits and vegetables. Green and red peppers and apples and blueberries, everyone smiling such difficult smiles, not easy smiles, but smiles full of resentment and fear—
I corrected myself. I had no right to judge these people I’ve never met nor ever will, presuming that their smiles are forced or bitter, when there was every possibility in the world that these were happy and good people, that the senator from North Dakota for example was wholly normal and content, was someone who loved those close to him and did what he could to aid those he represented. It was entirely possible that the distinguished senator from Oklahoma was stung every time a poll indicated the public’s lack of trust and admiration for those they elected. Maybe he was hurt. Maybe when results like that were conveyed to him he shook and vomited and went to his window for air and called his mother, who still lived in his childhood home and was widowed and who soothed him by using both his first and last names, and whispered them together, over and over and over and over—
Oh Jim
Oh James
Oh James honey
Oh Jimmy my dearest one
Oh Jimmy Inhofe
Jimmy, Jimmy my son
Oh Jimmy Inhofe
Jim-Jim
Jimmy Inhofe Jimmy Inhofe
—and this would work for the senator, though neither of them would know exactly why.
It was dark and the phone was ringing; the pillowcase beneath my mouth was soaked.
“You awake?”
I’d slept for two hours. It felt like minutes.
Hand came in and we ordered pizza and watched Kingpin on cable. The guilt was monumental. We were wasting the time allotted. We had had hours and we slept. We could have been doing something. This week was about using minutes and hours like these, taking them and holding them, polishing them, throwing them as far as we could, but at our first opportunity—all these hours free and full of infinite choice—we’d done nothing. We could have hitchhiked somewhere. We could have knocked on doors—even in this hotel—and met or groped new people. But no, nothing. We’d bought the Senegal tickets but now were waiting for pizza in an O’Hare Best Western—we wanted to be able to tell people about every hour this week, that every hour we had done something not-or-seldom-before done (at least by people like us) but instead we were watching the angry hustler guys put Woody’s hand in the bowling-ball retriever machine.
“If you think about it,” Hand said, tearing a slice from its crust, “the original schedule had us getting into Dakar at 1 in the morning, too late to do anything anyway. Now we get in at 9 A.M. or something. Same difference, except we sleep on the plane.”
He was right. He was a titan. We were again golden.
And in an hour the phone rang again; the shuttles were coming. We jogged down to the lobby. In the lobby, what seemed to be a hundred Senegalese dignitaries milled and lined up. There were a few women among them, a pair our age, their skin so smooth and unblemished it seemed fake or to
o tautly stretched. I was caught staring at the full round hips of a woman in red, the color of new blood in direct sunlight.
I nudged Hand. He rolled his eyes.
He knew I liked women of heft and generous curve, 5′11″ and up, as tall or taller than me—I’m maybe 6′1″—and with exuberant, exaggerated lines. It was a preference I’d developed in the past few years, after dating Charlotte, who remade me in the shade of her luxurious form. Charlotte was a plus-size model of grand sweeping landscapes, who demanded attention of sidewalks and living rooms and had a soft loud laugh like the clashing of great white clouds. We’d been together for six months or so when she announced she wanted to move to Los Angeles to do the usual things. I was invited along but passed and it was just as well. We’d begun to snap and gnaw with moods and boredom—“How could you say that when you know I can’t whistle?” “How could you say that when you know my aunt is diabetic?” and besides, I’d run out of logical and erotic metaphors and in our particular coupling, with its foundation in the bedroom, this drought meant doom. She had a thing for metaphors during sex—Me: “I’m plowing your field! I’m plowing your field!” Charlotte: “Speed the plow! Speed the plow!”—and demanded new, evermore exotic images—“I’m docking my star-fighter!” “I’m stuffing your burrito!” “I’m … I’m sinking your … tight, wet … battleship!”—and I guess at a certain point, when I found myself consulting friends for ideas—it was Hand who came up with the the starfigher/docking/Galactica analogy, which didn’t do much for her—it just became too much work.
I stopped staring as a bellhop, middle-aged and white with a thin droopy mustache, spoke to us.
“You guys had a nice dinner did you?”
“I guess,” I said. I had the greasy feeling he was talking to us because we were two of only three white people (Carradine, now regaling others with his tales of luck and encompassing hospitality and poor math skills) in the lobby.
“You guess. C’mon! I saw that pizza come through. You two had a feast!”
Hand and I smiled. The bellhop had what I hoped was toothpaste at the corners of his mouth.
—You moron.
—I am sorry Will.
—Wipe the spittle from your mouth.
—I am sorry Will.
I told him he was welcome to the rest of the pizza, that we’d only eaten half and the rest was still there, in the room. He said he might just do that—if Rose hadn’t already gotten it. I didn’t ask who Rose was. Where was Hand? Suddenly Hand was gone.
“So you’re going to Africa too?” the bellman asked.
I nodded.
“Listen, just watch yourself,” he said. “The place is a mess. They got it cut up like a pizza pie.” Pizza again. He liked pizza. He stepped closer to me. “They’re always killing each other! Brother against brother! You’re going where again?”
“Senegal.”
“Senegal. Senegal! You gotta watch out there. Remember—hey! [Grabbing my shoulder] That’s the place where they shot down the Navy pilot and dragged him around by his penis!”
I told him he was thinking of Somalia. He shook his head at me, as if I were the king of chumps. Hand had returned.
“I used to send money to Africa,” the bellman was saying, “but then I realized the warlords were taking all of it. They take the money and then when we send supplies the Russians come down and carry it away on planes. They cart it away!”
“Right,” Hand said, pointing at him. “You’re right.” I couldn’t tell if Hand was being serious.
“Didn’t know that, eh?” the bellhop confided to me. “The Russians get all the stuff we send—they buy it straight from the warlords.” He loved that word. “It’s crazy. So now I don’t send money.”
I shook the man’s hand and winced. I’d forgotten my hand was half-broken. Hand shook the man’s hand.
“What is your name sir?” he asked.
“Robby.” The man was easily fifty.
“Robby, we thank you.” Hand did a little bow.
We got on the shuttle.
I understood the Earth’s shadow on the moon. I knew that the Earth was hiding most of the moon from the light this night, leaving a curved white blade. What I didn’t know was why the moon and its shadow should be so clear, the lines so clean. The sun wasn’t at all clear; its outline was debatable and changing. And though I know the sun is gas and the moon is rock, still I wonder why the moon’s circumference would be so clear, its edges so crisp—cut from cardboard with scissors.
The plane turned around and now the moon was behind us.
Our seats on the plane were first class and we didn’t know why. We worried that we were white and in first class while the Senegalese people, better dressed and better educated and maybe even of aristocratic blood, were behind us in coach. Between Hand and me we had three years of college at UW–La Crosse and, until recently, nothing in the bank. We buried this shame in the drawer next to all the inequities, and ate. The flight attendant asked us to close our window shades; if we didn’t we would disturb the people in the towns we were flying over—
“Is that really what she said?” I said.
“I think,” Hand said,
—then Hand fell asleep. I did shortly afterward, but woke up hourly and moved stiffly—so stiffly even in first class—as if my flesh had been mixed with gravel. I got up at about 3 A.M. and remembered I had to sign the traveler’s checks. At the bank they’d told me to sign them all before I traveled. I’d forgotten the directive immediately, meant to do it at home, then almost remembered in the cab, then the airport, then figured I’d have time on the plane. I turned toward the window and hid my task with my back and arm, glancing around periodically to make sure no one was watching, no one who would tell their buddies in Dakar that there were these tourists made of money—God I hated this money and this was why; it recast me and refracted my vision—on the plane who should be robbed and stabbed and later dragged around by their penises.
The signing was endless. The cashier had run out of $500 checks after the first six and so the rest were $100s, two hundred and ninety of them total, in envelopes of ten. After each check was signed I let it drop to my lap; when each set of ten was done I gathered them, neatened them, stacking—click-click on the tray table—and inserted them back into their envelope.
Out my portal the plane wing was silver and shining like it would have fifty years earlier, carrying happier and simpler people. All of them smoking and speaking loudly—musically barking every last word—and wearing expensive hats. When did we start flying like this? So cavalier like this? I should have known, but didn’t. Hand would know. Everything like that Hand knew, or pretended to know. So many questions. Did the floatation devices really float? Did planes actually float long enough for us to get out, jumping down those wide and festive yellow inflatable slides? And also: Would it be easier to kill someone who was beautiful, or someone who was ugly? What if you had to do it with your own hands, hovering above? I think there would be a difference. And why, when we see a half-broken window, do we want it all broken? We see the shards rising from the pane and we long to knock them out, one by one, like teeth. Questions, questions. Did Vaclav Havel have emphysema, or was I imagining that? Who had emphysema? Someone over there.
I wanted to be asleep on this flight. Too much time in my head would bring me back. To Oconomowoc and further, to that funeral home prick and what he did to Jack. Of course a closed-casket. What were you thinking, people?
My signature on each $100 meant it was mine. But otherwise the checks bore no sign of ownership; the potential for fraud and misuse seemed enormous. All of these blank things, beautiful though, their crosshatched Spartans watching as I signed, the checks bearing the colors of the sea, a Mediterranean sea, where bathers lie on rocks—everything so corruptible. But I could make them safer by signing them. Signature—mine! Blank and impersonal monies all of them until I swooped down and put my name there, swip shoosh swip, on the line. $100 after $100. My pen was
so quick, and steady, and I pushed hard to make it clear and legible; the swooping was audible! Signature—mine! Signature—mine! Each ten checks a thousand, all mine in the neat envelope. Mine! I began to feel that all that money that had been sitting dormant in that strange account, that godforsaken money market account set up by Cathy Wambat—she did some minor-league financial planning on the side—was for once almost real. What had been for so long just a number on a line in a statement mailed monthly was now in a stack on a tray table, made real by hundreds of names, all mine, as hundreds of Spartans looked on.
I got sick of my signature. I couldn’t do it anymore; I hated my name. I had signed ninety checks and rubbed my tired hand like they do on commercials for arthritis. And slowly I realized I would have to sign again, each time I used or cashed one, in the presence of the teller or clerk. Five hundred and eighty-six times my signature would claim this money. Mine! Mine! Swoop! Swoop!
A man across the aisle, broad torso under blue blanket, glanced at me and my checks, my neat piles and busy pen, and rolled his eyes. The money wasn’t mine and he knew it. The money was lost, someone’s lost money, money that had been liberated from any kind of logical roost and had flown, madly, to me.
So I’d been given $80,000 to screw in a lightbulb. There is almost no way to dress it up; that’s what it was. My boss has a brochure he had his son make up on the computer, a two-fold xeroxed thing with a list of services, past projects and pictures. The last edition, honest to God, featured a picture of me on a stepladder, installing a lightbulb. I have no idea why West Side Contractors would want to so boldly advertise their lightbulb-installing capabilities, but there it was. Was it a joke on me, Will Chmielewski—something about Poles—sorry, Polacks—and their abilities insofar as lightbulb-screwing goes? My boss insisted it was not—Never! he said, Jesus, Will, no way!—then went back to his trailer, muffling a guffaw. So next thing I know there’s a call from someone at Leo Burnett, the ad agency with the huge building on the river, and they want to know how I like the idea of being immortalized on millions of packages of some kind of new bulb.