by Tito Perdue
Detouring around the balloon man down below, he hopped on board the bus that had so kindly come to curb at just that moment. But at the next intersection, having assayed the riders, and reminding himself that each breath he took had been emitted by some fool, he jumped back off again. There had been an earnest-looking schoolboy with a book and apple, but except for that, the other passengers made him hate himself for having ever agreed to a mode of transportation in which people stood pressed up against one another. Richest city in the western world. A woman had been chewing gum, a man was snoring on his feet, the driver had a face significantly like a shrimp’s.
Somewhere between 8:38 and a minute or two later than that, he turned and proceeded at a superior clip down along a row of stores proffering consumer products. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught sight of a bridal shop and just next to that the branch office of a team of divorce lawyers. He passed a liquor store, a nail salon, a waxing boutique, a stock and bonds broker, an outlet for erotic toys, and then a travel agency tenanted with sun-tanned agents dressed in shorts. His mind hurried back to Mesopotamia, where no doubt mankind had originally “run off the rails,” to use one of his preferred clichés.
The elevator, when he came to it, had three persons in it. Philip smiled at each in turn, and then resorted instead to the staircase where almost at once he descried a defunct escrubilator that had apparently expired in an unavailing effort to climb the stairs. Someone had published an obscenity on the wall while someone else had left a small puddle of vomit in the corner. And yet, when he came to his own floor, the employees were all more or less well-dressed, and one might have thought they were much better people than in fact he knew they were.
He visited the men’s room and spent a long time causing his hair to look as if he were indifferent as to how it might look to a woman in the 15-58 age bracket. He had a book in one hand and in the other a wretched little meal of bread and cheese. Could anything be more ignoble, more obscene really, than this habitual fashion of eating and excreting, of peristaltic action, of expectorants and phlegm, paramecia infestation and the “fairy dust,” he called it, of dandruff and related stuffs? What, had Apollo needed to worry about these concerns? He had not.
It was just three minutes until nine when he sallied from the men’s room and, putting on a rugged expression, hove into view of the file clerks and computer operators. A few seconds having gone by, he suddenly began to feel (and not for the first time!) fully disgusted with himself. Would he never learn? That for a person like himself, adulation on the part of ordinary girls ought be seen as an insult?
He smoked, read, and gave a few moments to his twentieth-storey view that was in a bad phase owing to the all-too-bright weather. And where now was the vision that must have entranced Gregory of Tours as he looked down from his tower upon the ruined fields of France? He sought for that scene, Philip did, in the phantasmagoria of cigarette smoke.
He “worked” till noon and then, taking his lunch with him, slipped into the cafeteria, where he wasn’t able right away to spot anyone deserving of passage on Noah’s Ark, or public education, or a tax-supported medical system. He did see girls, twenty- and thirty-year-old fledglings all talking at the same time. He waited patiently to take their smiles, but then grew bitter when so few of them — they were spoiled — came his way. Had they surfeited themselves on his profile, his pertinacious nose, and the rest? Relocating to a better location, he nodded to the one loyal individual who managed finally to nod, and rather weakly, in his general direction.
The food was wretched and he was able to claim at least a little bit of attention by scrunching up the bag and tossing it, accurately, into the trash basket that lay a full fifteen feet to leeward side. Left with but a single orange, he set about peeling the thing in installments, smoking betimes. He was not immune certainly to the girls with their lipstick and sweaters, their legs, etc., and had no complaint to make about the methods they had chosen for their earthly mission, namely to generate attention and produce the next generation of lovely girls. Sitting there all alone, he tried to analyze these creatures, a people made of candy who had by no means invented such strange clothing merely to regale their mirrors.
He focused on one example particularly, a genuinely good-looking exhibit whom he compared to the entire corpus of sculpture, music and western literature in general. In fact (he admitted it), he felt an urgent wish to rush to the girl, put her on the floor, and carry out two or three unprecedented procedures on her recumbent form.
Instead he returned hastily to his office and made a phone call. He had a salaried prostitute at his beck, a middle-aged woman who had contracted to preserve her celibacy for at least twelve hours in advance of their Thursday confrontations. Eschewing the subway, he strode the ten blocks to his apartment in twenty-one minutes and a few seconds and succeeded in entering the place by 1:04. A few minutes more allowed him to refresh himself and mix a drink, and then stand by the window as he waited for her taxi.
She was the best of persons and the worst of persons, and had a figure that conformed to his demands. Dressed conservatively in a grey ensemble designed to allay her profession, he knew well what that suit contained.
“God, Philip,” she said, “you should let me fix up this place a little bit.”
It was bleak, his two-room quarters. Together they looked about at it. Finally she said:
“Well, here I am. What, you having an emergency or something?”
“It’s these new clothing fashions.”
“Ha. And now all of us look like whores.”
“Not you.”
“You’re sweet.”
He made a drink for her. Her hair was black and her bosoms were as richly developed as could plausibly be expected. Nor was she as ignorant as you probably expected, due in part to her two years of college. And then, too, she had reached an age where no preference and/or request could any longer surprise her. Of course he would have preferred to be in love, a talent unavailable to people of his kind.
“Come here, Nathalie” (birth name Flo). “I’ve only got an hour.”
“Gosh, don’t I even get to finish my drink?”
She did however come up close to him and after staring into his exceptional eyes until 1:21, said:
“Maybe I should be paying you.”
“You can’t afford me.”
As forbearing as he was, he allowed the woman to undress him, the usual procedure in their relations with each other. His member, horribly engorged, felt like an icicle. Checking his watch and tossing the hair out of his eyes, he then began to reenact that age-old Pleistocene procedure that would eventuate in a restored mind, clean and calm, and as perceptive as always.
Finally, you should know that he was never to expose the details of that or any other afternoon, popular demand notwithstanding. Save this — that although the experience was a positive thing, it was less than what his beauty and his money had deserved. He wanted metaphysical episodes, as good as what Mohammed must have felt during his tour of the planets and the stars.
Seven
His mind remained calm and clear even unto the weekend, at which time he mounted his bicycle and drove off toward the home of the organization’s retired CPA, who had always had a poor opinion both of Philip and Philip’s opinions. It was a considerable voyage through three highly unlike slums, ending up in front of a two-storey home with a pot of artificial flowers on the porch. No, those were real flowers, as he verified by sniffing at them.
It was a rubicund man who answered the door, a sometimes alcoholic who had thrown away his life in office buildings. Retrieving his glasses, he looked at Philip for a long time before letting out a groan.
“No, no, I’ve already told you what I think. Anyway, you needn’t take it so seriously.”
“I just thought I’d drop by and...”
“Not that you’re the only one. It’s the disease — narcissism — of our epoch. The ‘fly in the buttermilk,’ if you will.
Well, you take care of yourself, you hear?”
He was able, Philip, to stay the door by means of a slender volume that thwarted the mechanism.
“I thought you might care to have this.”
“Got too many books already. What is it?”
The linguist stood by as the retiree opened the cover and glanced at the foreword. Having done with that, he continued over to the table of contents, the photo of the author, and finally the index itself before going into the body of the text itself. Here, too, he read in several places before shutting the book and then right away opening it up again.
“All right, I’ll take this.”
They looked at each other. Philip detected a ruckus of some kind going on in the upper floor, but whether there was a wife up there, or children, or pets and animals, he couldn’t be sure.
“Thought you might want to offer me a cup of coffee,” Philip speculated.
“No, I really don’t want to stay out here in the sun that long. Gets in your eyes.”
“Use sunglasses.”
“Sure. And then I couldn’t read at all.”
“Yes, but they have different gradients, don’t you see. Some have lenses that are as transparent, almost, as air itself.”
“I expect. And just what good would that do me? If I may ask?”
“They have a Polaroid effect.”
“Jesus. You haven’t changed at all, have you?”
Without a book, he had to use his foot, Philip, to leverage the door. Behind the man he could make out the forms of three, possibly four sheepdogs lying in a heap. No wife, although the boy didn’t entirely discount the possibility. Also a map of Italy or Greece, and never mind how difficult it was even for Philip to discriminate between peninsulas at such a distance — about thirty feet, according to his reckoning. Sheepdogs indeed, he understood them now as a single mastiff of abnormal size. Said Philip:
“I could bring you up to date on the company. The scandals, for example, and other happenings.”
The sofa was unclean, as also the wife — he had one — whose apron appeared to be smeared, if not with blood, with a condiment of some kind. Philip bowed to her and was actually in motion to kiss her hand when, suddenly, she gathered up the overfull ashtray and scurried from the room. Greece, not Italy; coming near, Philip inspected the Beotian plain, an area that had produced so many brave men. But as to Thebes itself, apparently it hadn’t been revealed to the mapmakers what Alexander had done to that place. Meanwhile his mind was clear and smoothly running, a gift from Nathalie. Gift? He always paid dearly for the therapy she carried wherever she went.
But by now the two men had finished with the coffee, the scandals, and the immense dog now remanded to another room. The accountant said:
“Whatever happened to that little brown-headed girl?”
“The heavy one? Got married.”
“Really! I wouldn’t have thought it possible.”
“Nothing wrong with that girl,” Philip claimed. “She was very quiet, and seemed to know her place.”
“Wait a minute, this can’t be you. Sticking up for city people?”
“Yes, but we have to have a certain number of that type. People to do the boring things and still be satisfied.”
“People with fingers but no brains.”
“Why yes. And no souls either.”
“No souls. And yet these ‘types,’ as you say, are doing the very best they can!”
“Yes, that’s the horror of it.”
“And yet they’re a much greater benefit to the world than you. And by a long shot!”
“Ah! There it is again — the pragmatic argument. The works of Theopompus have all been lost; therefore, his life was wasted according to you. Me, I’m glad to waste my life, provided I can waste it on things that are big and great.”
“Great? Why, you’re just a goddamn little old sub-atomic particle in this big ole universe! Deep down, I’ve never really liked you at all.” (His eyes were bulging. Philip looked at the larger one.)
“You give me great pleasure.”
Both men lifted themselves an inch or two off the sofa, but both then sank back down again. It was exactly 1:43 in the early afternoon. Gathering his philosophy around him, Philip deployed it like this:
“The only important things are those that take place in the minds of individuals. That’s how people like me store up credits in paradise. And the intense pleasure of gaining insights.”
“Oh good, paradise. I wouldn’t have thought it of you. Hey, Sarah! we got us a goddamn mystic using up our coffee.”
The woman did come and stand in the doorway, fretting with her hands for a few moments. Dressed in an apron that showed that she knew her place, Philip liked her at once.
“Hell, she’s worth more than you,” the accountant claimed. “She actually does useful work! Sometimes.”
“Fine woman. But thank heavens Wagner didn’t rely on the likes of her. You just don’t get it, do you? How a handful of gold isotopes is worth more than whole stars constructed just of copper.”
“Very nicely put! Bastard. What you going to do, Phil, when you’re eighty years old and your brain’s the size of a walnut? Will the girls still like you then? I don’t think so.”
“They wouldn’t like me now, if they could see the things I think.”
“I can believe that. My disadvantage is that I can see what you’re thinking.”
“Yes, but you have to admit it’s real exciting in there.” (He pointed to his head.)
“Not to me.”
“Well of course not to you. You’re not one of us.”
“Bastard. You’re going to be dead pretty soon, you son of a bitch, and all those isotopes is going to turn into pure piss and run off into the ground!”
“Not so. We never die, not really, people like me. We just slip away into some other dimension where we can go on thinking.”
“Well, at least you’ll be out of our hair.”
Philip smiled jovially and then handed off his cup to the woman and waved her away. He noted then that the man had a full, or almost a full bound set of the thoughts and evasions of Abraham Lincoln. He tried not to laugh out loud, failing.
Fond of his bicycle, the linguist especially liked to weave in and out of the obtuse automobiles that sought to block his way. Always obedient to the law, he halted at an intersection and got into a brief exchange with a female driver. He knew that he was encompassed by tall buildings, strange growths that stultified everyone within their shadows. He knew, too, what was going on in those structures, which is to say commerce and business and telephone conversations. Is this what life was for? And could aught be more dispiriting than that love and music and hiking through the woods required an economic platform like that? He was thinking, of course, about advertising and mutual funds, insurance, taxes, public relations, and all the other ingredients in humanity’s search for a shortcut to death.
He passed a Negro in a peculiar haircut, two Hispanics holding hands, three frozen-faced Chinese in dark suits, four lesbians, five Australasian skin jobs, and then a normal-looking white American male wearing an ethereal expression. It was 3:27 in the afternoon, and his nation had just another forty years, approximately speaking, before the extinction so devotedly desired.
Eight
July arrived at the proper moment, bringing with it a climate that the New Yorkers seemed to imagine was too warm. He had seen, Philip had, far better heat than this during his one and a half years in northeast Mexico.
Still calm, he carried his prostitute to an opera, followed it up with a late meal, and then sent her home by way of a taxi under the management of a Tibetan, he believed she was. Eschewing any such transportation for himself, he walked an enormous distance down the length of that island, which is to say until he espied a rather tiny bookshop still open at this untoward hour. He entered the place, fully determined to take advantage of one of the few good things the city offered — bookstores, operas, resta
urants, and a large enough number of women to yield a few hundred with the sort of figure he required.
The books, composed entirely of marketplace failures, were even better than he had expected. Suddenly he plunged forward with arm outstretched, gleeful to find an early edition of one of his all-time favorite human beings, Bruno by name. Here at last was a man like himself, proud enough and brave to endure a life locked up in a punishment cage. (Philip’s way of characterizing big cities.) He grabbed for the book, bringing down on his head four or five adjacent volumes that hadn’t properly been shelved in the first place.
He gathered the book, apologized to the man standing next to him and then, standing on tiptoes, began to replace the fallen items with a better sense of their relative importance than the shopkeeper seemed to possess. Meantime the scarecrow standing next to him had pounced on the Bruno and was splashing through the pages.
“Pardon me,” quoted Philip with the ingrained politeness that made him so attractive to people. “That happens to be the very book that I...”
Both men now stood up straight and glared at one another.
“Oh God, no,” one of them said.
“Jesus. How did you get here?” said the one left over.
“Me? Me? I’ve been here six years already!”
“I understand that. But why? That’s what I was getting at.”
“Money. For the money, I suppose. So I won’t have to work a thousand years before retiring.”
“You call that work? I’ve been with the same goddamn company for six goddamn years!”
“So you said. And everybody heard you, too.”
“Alright, just what exactly is this ‘work’ you keep talking about? Hm?”
The linguist was reluctant to reply. “Exports,” he said finally in small voice.
Both men laughed.
“And you? What have you been doing all this time?”