Downtown Manhattan, March 1988
He woke up in the living room, facing a scratch on the wall. His knees were separated at the joint and some of his toes scattered over the floor. Something stank. It wasn’t puke or anything, just bad sweat, smelling like a filthy bar rag. He pushed himself up on his elbow, saw the halo of dampness beneath his body, and dropped himself back down. The clock’s LED blinked twelve noon, as it probably had for the last several hours. He bounced up and ran to the bedroom. Bank receipts, envelopes, and coins went flying as he rummaged for the travel clock. Nine-forty. He saw it for a moment before it went blank, as the battery flew out of the back. That would make it about nine-twenty-three. Skipping a few steps on the way to the bathroom, he grabbed a photo of Sally that was stuck to his toe.
In the mirror his eyes swelled. His hair stood in a thicket of overgrowth. He splashed hot water on his face and lathered it, grabbed a disposable razor and only cut himself three times. His bloody gums turned the toothpaste pink. Reaching behind the curtain, he turned on the shower and adjusted the temperature before stripping. Letting out a long and emphatic flatus he stepped into the tub.
“Riiiinnng…,” went the phone.
Grabbing a towel, slipping on the floor, he steadied himself and dripped back into the living room.
“Hello. Yeah, I’ll be right in. No, don’t let them go without me. I’m out the door. I’ll grab a cab.”
Slam!
Sally stood next to the soap dish. As he stood drying himself, he fought off a distracting urge spawned by the fear of impending doom.
His hair was wet and it was cold out, but it helped him wake up. A swarm of yellow cabs passed before he got to the corner, but by the time he arrived there was nothing. His jaw locked and his shoulders rode up around his ears. There was an empty one about three blocks down the avenue waiting for the light to turn. A woman beside him in a leather coat and tights held up her hand. He felt an inclination to hurl himself between her and the car, but turned away and let her take the ride, peeping down at the pathetic brown wing tips, draped by the gray that fell from his tattered black raincoat. He shamefully tucked his copy of Amour Fou into his coat sleeve and turned his twisted face away from the avenue.
As tension turned another notch, the neighborhood zoomed back, as if pressed tightly against a lens bulging outward from where he was standing. On the edge moved a cab with its roof light on. He held up his hand, and when it pulled up beside him, threw himself in.
“William and Fulton,” he rasped, “just below the Brooklyn Bridge, two blocks east of Broadway.”
The cabby was grayish, several days unshaved, with a frizzed ponytail. He fiddled with something on his lap and stuck it behind the visor, saying “Jeez, what a strange morning. You’re like the third fare I picked up, and it seems like I’ve been out for hours.”
“Oh yeah, slow?” Peter asked, pushing himself into the corner to get as much of himself out of mirror view as possible.
“Menacing. Frightening. Just look around. Some real baddies out there.”
Peter looked out the window. He didn’t notice. Beyond his own immediate terror, nothing seemed any more frightening than it ever was. “Sure, I see what you mean, man.”
“I knew you would. I could tell the way you scrunched your head between your shoulders and rocked back and forth. Like you had to pee. Do you have to pee?”
Peter turned his attention to his bladder just to see if the lunatic was reading his mind. “No. Not yet.”
“Yeah, see?”
Peter glanced at his watch. He didn’t have a watch. He had lost it over a month ago, and didn’t see the point in getting another one, not with all the clocks in the city. It didn’t matter anyway. Late was late, though at this point life offered him a huge flexibility, one of the perks, he guessed, of this recent disintegration of credibility.
“Are you the searcher?” asked the cabby. He scratched his gray head and looked again into the mirror.
“Huh?” said Peter, startled out of his daze. The driver didn’t repeat himself for a few moments, but when he did Peter realized he had heard right.
“Ah, what do you mean by ‘searcher,’ and what do you mean by ‘the?’”
“Nothing. Just someone I was supposed to meet. I thought you might be him.”
“Me? Isn’t that some John Wayne western?”
“Something else, what I’m talking about. A card reader lady told me. You understand. I know it’s a little weird. People think, too many tabs of acid,” said the driver, tapping the side of his head, “maybe, waiting to get shipped off to Vietnam. Stuff like that. Sometimes I think it’s TV that does it.”
“I understand.” Peter did. “I stopped watching.”
“Christ! How’d ya do it?”
After avoiding television, movies, radio, and most magazines, for several months Peter was still suffering from heavy withdrawal symptoms, and had trouble picturing himself without the image getting overlaid by that of a cop, rock singer, or a standup comic. This happened particularly during times of duress or fatigue, and especially while trying to visualize his way out of an unpleasant situation, say, when he found himself trying to explain himself to people, most frequently his boss or Sally. He hoped that something of his real self might eventually emerge if he flushed the system, something besides a willowy emptiness, a turbulent nothing, if there was, in fact, anything else.
But there was something else, something more disturbing, and that was the thing he didn’t like to think about.
“I turned the damn thing in,” he said. “Gave it to Good Will.”
“Drastic measure.”
“Takes determination.”
Ten minutes later he was in the elevator drilling a fingernail into the seam of his coat pocket. He got off at the 14th floor and tried to sneak past the receptionist.
“Peter, good afternoon,” said sweetly smug Marion, looking and sounding like Mother Theresa’s fashion model grand niece. “Dave would like to see you first thing.”
He grabbed the message she was holding out to him, a radiant fuchsia-pink paper rectangle inscribed, in perfect penmanship, with Sally’s name and other crucial details. The time, checked off, was 9:15 AM. He stuffed it in his shirt pocket and rushed to his cubicle, removed his coat, brushed himself off, felt himself sweat for a few moments, and walked over to Dave’s office. Dave’s secretary was away from her desk, so he knocked on the door. It opened with a grave swing, slowly revealing the blue vested, red tied figure.
“Hi Dave.”
Dave stood, looked at him blankly, eyes slowly sharpening, individual hairs rising electrically out of his auburn dome. He wore a look that struck Peter on the chest and sent him backwards a few millimeters. Eyes locked, they wrestled for a moment, and Peter felt himself diffuse into the atmosphere of the room, shocked into attentiveness. Dave looked away, went back to his desk, sat.
“The other day I saw a woman with feet so swollen she could hardly balance unless she held onto something,” he said. “She was also missing some toes. You know I’m not a charitable guy but I gave her a few bucks because I don’t need shit like that on my conscience when I’ve got an office to run. It makes me feel like a good guy, like I care, like I’m doing the best I can. A couple of weeks ago I ran into some clown whose skin looked like it was just about to fall off of him, and I gave him a five-spot just for the show.” For a moment his head turned, his eyes giving Peter a disinterested stare. He turned back to the wall and continued. “Again—I’m not generally charitable, and I don’t want you to confuse me with someone who is. I don’t go handing out paychecks around here just out of the goodness of my heart, you know.”
Peter behaved himself: sat and listened, as if taking in some new and important information.
“I like to run things pretty loosely around here,” Dave continued, standing up again, pacing briefly as he kept his eyes on Peter, “as you can probably tell. I like it that way, and that’s the way other people like it—I think.” He looked away and walked to his chair and sat down, put his elbow on the desk and stared out of the window.
“Some people don’t.”
There was a pause. A silence of fifteen seconds. It spread itself throughout the office in a mist, making the air seem fresh and light, ready to yield, with traces of horror film glimmer seeping in from the edges.
“My boss, for instance, Mort Johnston, doesn’t like it one bit. People like him would just love to shut us down, Pete. He could absorb our services into a whole lot of other areas he can more easily justify keeping alive. He’s from the old school. Can’t live with ambiguity. I think he even goes to church.” Dave’s head rolled back around, drawing Peter deeper into his trance. “I’d like to keep it, this little strange machine we’ve got going here. I worked hard to grow it into what it’s become. But to them, it doesn’t make sense. It shouldn’t exist. Doesn’t follow any textbook architecture of departmental design. More of an organically grown squiggly thing that drives them nuts every time I have to explain the accounting, and what we do here. You don’t know the resistance I go up against almost every day. And every day I beat it. And sometimes your input helps a great deal.”
“But I had that meeting with Schenk today—Schenk the ballbuster—and where the hell were you? I looked like an idiot in there. And you, snoring away at home with the bottle shoved up your ass. Don’t tell me it was the plumbing again. That didn’t work last month. It’s late in the quarter, Pete. You know that.”
“Yes sir.”
Dave picked a cigarette out of his pocket and tapped it on his desk, then held it down on an angle until it bent. “I can’t take another chance like this. I know you won’t fuck up again. On another day it mightn’t have made a bit of difference. You know I don’t give a shit about time. You have it, when you need it. That’s the way I want it for me, more rope to hang myself. And it’s only fair.”
Peter began wondering what was wrong, whether he was still drunk from the night before, or something more severe. What was this incandescent calm, so untypical of him, that he seemed to be bathing in—none of the usual panicking, sweating, the melee of paralyzing thoughts whirling through his head.
“Just don’t fuck me up again or I’ll let you have it.”
With this, Dave’s eyes radiated toxicity. His head changed size and shape minutely, but his eyes stayed locked in place. At this point Peter broke back into being his old self again, the percolation of his stomach, increased activity of his sweat glands, tightness of his limbs, facial musculature, surging of his blood, faintness near to tipping over.
When he got back to his desk, Peter yanked at the fuchsia note in his shirt pocket, tearing small sections off one by one until there was little left of it, feeling his hangover shift gears, scattering with the pink scraps raining down on his desk. He dropped his head in his hands, pressed his palms into his eyes, watching the geometric patterns forming over his closed eyelids. He tossed a stack of old papers in the trash, picked up the phone, and gingerly tapped out Sally’s number.
“Verity Travel. How may I help you?” came a cheerfully bloodless voice.
“Yes. I want… Is Sally Cantor there?”
“Sure thing. Hold just a moment.”
His fingers tapped twice and grabbed at his knee. On top of the computer monitor stood a picture of Sally, blonde and upright, with softness chiseled into severity. The glare of the Plexiglas frame was broken in the middle by a faint scratch, which fell across her chest like a palm, making her seem most generous and tolerant.
“Hello, this is Sally,” said a voice he drank in that burned on the way down.
“Hi. You called?”
“Oh, it’s you,” she said. “I was worried. I thought you might have done yourself in. You know, after that…”
“Shit…” said Peter. “I know I keep promising. But things aren’t that bad. I don’t think.” He listened eagerly for her reply.
“If they were you’d probably have me to blame.”
“Not to blame. You’d be involved, surely, but there’s no blame.”
“I’m always involved, aren’t I?” Sally asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Somewhere inside you’re always blaming me for everything. I mean really, despite what you say.”
“That’s not true. I never gave you any reason to believe that. That’s you, your guilt. I only said that when things are good with us nothing else seems to matter as much.” He slouched and sketched invisibly on his desktop.
“So I’m at least the cause of your feeling the brunt of it, that mythic agony of yours. If I was more considerate, a servant only to your desires and expectations, you’d be happier. You think.”
“Okay, okay, let’s get off it. I don’t feel like arguing. I feel like my whole life is an argument.”
“Fine.” He heard something between a grunt and an exhalation.
“But Peter,” Sally continued.
“Yes?”
“What are you going to do if you lose your job?”
“No such luck.”
“No, I’m serious. Think about what I’m saying! What? Are you going to move back with your parents or something?”
“A—I’m not going to lose my job over this. That’s not how the story goes. B—Even if I did, I would be able to find another one. I’m not helpless, you know.”
“Sometimes I wonder.”
“Look, I’m here every day. I never call in sick, late sometimes, yes, but they’re not getting rid of me over something like that.”
“Don’t be so sure.”
“It’s just that my brother, you know how he likes to live it up. It’s not like he’s in the city all the time, you know. He’s like…”
“I know, Mr. Hyde, after finally killing Dr. Jekyll.”
“No, no, no—not that. I used to think Rasputin, before he shaved his beard.”
“Ha! He’s nothing like Rasputin. Rasputin was intelligent, first of all, and he was a hell of a lot more charismatic than Dennis will ever be. He was kind of wise, a mournful schizo, maybe, you know, like that guy we met that time at Moisture.”
“Oh, you mean that hippy hypocrite? The one who tried to read your palm? What was he, Eh-stone-ian? All those hippy eurotrash jerks are the same. Think they’ve got soul because they can rattle off a lot of fluff about dead German philosophers, like their spoiled-brat American, ivy-fed cousins, your friend Janet, as a for instance. They’re really all pretty two dimensional, despite all that metaphysical vomit they can hurl at you in every shape and stench.”
“Oh, and you’re not.” She had often called him out for being a little too proud of growing up in a classic suburban neighborhood where more kids just happened to end up in prison than elite colleges.
“I don’t know what I am. Fractured. I feel like a broken mirror, a wheel of surfaces. Depth is no option.”
Sally spat laughter into the phone. “Yeah. Yeah. Almost right. More like a broken record. Wheel of surfaces, my ass. I’m going to have to stop lending you my books.”
Peter rocked and then slouched in his chair.
“I hope you at least made him stay,” said Sally.
“Oh, Dennis? Nah. But don’t worry. One thing I can say about him, he’s got a great automatic pilot.”
“Make sure he wills it to you. You can have them remove it at the morgue some night.”
“Forget it. There’s more chance he’ll get mine, but I don’t see how it would do him any good.”
“I’ll say. Oh, and by the way, the reason I’m calling, my brat friend Janet can’t do it any other night this week, so I’m getting together with her later. If you want to meet me for a little while, I can do it, but you’ll have to come up here.” He sank further into his chair. Janet hated him. He hated Janet. Though he had tried briefly to befriend her, she just wouldn’t have it.
His stomach began to wrestle with itself. A small red light began flashing on his phone. He stammered and watched it blink, feeling it pulse in his temples. “Look,” he said. “I’ve got another call coming in. I’ve got to take it.”
“That place at Grand Central. You’ve got an hour, hour-and-a-half before she shows up.”
They hung up, and so had the other line. A list gurgled up from his inner database:
Record 1 She think(who) she is?
Record 2 Doing.always this_to_me.
Record 3 Shefeel() Not= love-me.
Record 4 Do(care) not what says(she).
Record 5 Me -> just_a_toy & piss_me_off.
Record 6 How (long) I_going_to_take_it?
Record 7 Me -> Feel small.
Record 8 CanDo(1, “yo_tengo”) -> nothing.
Record 9 I not(can) even_stand_up_for_myself.
Record 10 Me -> (perfect) slave.
Record 11 ***Why_do_I_let_her_do_this_to_me?
Record 12 Id_never_Get_away_with_Anything_Like_that.
Record 13 She.rights important.
Record 14 Im_not.
Record 15 Im_not_as_lovable_as_She_is.
Record 16 Im_Not_Beautiful.
Record 17 Im_Ugly_and_Despicable.
<> eof() = .t.
He let his head fall into the palm of his hand. He wore it like a patch over his left eye as his right blurred and fell on the stapler, daring it to transform, lose its banality. The cartridge shot out when he pressed the button on the back, spilling staples across the top of his desk. Composing himself, he eyed a small woven square of matches made like the rafts children make of popsicle sticks. He picked it up gently between his thumb and forefinger and inspected it like an archeologist would an object he was trying to catalog, disturbed by the precision and delicacy he had at certain mindless moments. Four bulbs flush against each side—cardboard sown into a kind of fabric. A chill traced through him as he realized he couldn’t remember doing it, although he knew, and recognized his handy -work. There was a small terror that had often accompanied Peter’s hangovers, with the idea that he was losing his mind, or that his consciousness was getting sucked away from him. As his dread expanded and spread deeper into his body, he shook his fist at Sally’s photo and swept his arm, dumping the staples and the stapler into the trash.
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