Flee

by Evan Dara

  That was then. This week Macie stayed.

  In her narrow kitchen, Carol polishes her silver. She does not have silver, she has stainless steel, and she has never polished it before. But there she is, standing rubbing a butter knife with a soft, synthetic cloth. Carol presses and twists the doth around the knife’s mock-Baroque Steel handle, pinches the doth away after reaching knife-handle end. Slots the knife back into its drawer compartment. Tells herself it’s good she has done this.

  —She’s not playing well. She’s missing notes – but Kissin does, too. But it’s more than that. There’s, what, a hesitancy to her playing – the tonus of the lines is not firm, the phrases are tentative, relinquished; she’s blinking before the tougher passagework and the weightier cadences, the music is, what, clotted … She is not at her best …

  For nearly a year, Audrey, my daughter, has planned this recital. As a gift, an offering to her friends, in our home. The Bach A Minor Partita, a triplet of Schubert Impromptus, a dessert of Satie. If needed, an encore by Chopin, the Ballade in A-flat – the one with the key change, it would be nice to hear her negotiate that. Now that only two of her friends remain, I brought in an audience. It was easy: I told Audrey that her friends invited friends and relatives of theirs, and I just added it to the budget. So, nice, every one of the folding chairs I put out in the living room was filled. There was everything you’d want for a fine concert: jostling, and breathing sounds, and hummy density. Before Audrey went on, we were backstage – our dining room – and I gave her a hug and a clutch of lilies to carry; she was adorable in her cinched white dress. I started Audrey on piano lessons when she was three, the same age as Uchida.

  But, then, her Bach was not one hundred percent, almost from the very beginning, starting at about bar four. But that could be accepted; Audrey was finding her footing. She finished well enough, with a great last flourish in the vertiginous mid-keyboard sixteenth notes, but then the applause came, and it was too vigorous, too demonstrative and loud. And Audrey seemed aware of this; when she stood and bowed, she kept her eyes down, except for one moment when they flashed and darted all over the room.

  Then, thereafter, what happened happened. I have heard Audrey play these Schubert bagatelles what, four hundred times over the last year, practicing patiently and lyrically in this same front room. But never like this, not even when she was first wading into the music. Fracturing notes, crimping tempos, withholding meaning, withholding herself. When the third of the Impromptus was over and, again, clapping crashed in like storm thunder, I had to force myself to applaud. At first, I had not applauded at all. For my own daughter. Then, when I did applaud, I kept my hands low.

  I so wanted to hear what I hear, here, every day – Audrey’s great lyric spark and clarity. To share that with our visitors, with whoever listens to this music here. And I do mean whoever: whoever, under any circumstances, is here, listening, in our house. I should have instructed them not to applaud too hard.

  During the Satie I had to leave the room. I will tell Audrey I was preparing the food: canapés, little cannoli and warm drinks. Happily, before she went on, she had seen that not all the food had been put on trays. I’m sure she saw this.

  I wanted so much for her to have a fine time, to make music. But the music was not there. Notes, yes; music, no. And much that was not musical, too.

  I once told Audrey that making music is giving love. That’s why music-making – real music-making – is hard. It’s hard to give love.

  —Hey, man, good to see you.

  Really, great to—

  —And if I were to go? Who would notice, who would care? What difference would it make?

  That’s why I must go. Why I must leave this city, be rid of it. To leave a place where my leaving would not be noticed. To no longer stay where I would not – I do not – care if I go.

  336

  Hmph. No surprise here. What you expect? Just keeps coming.

  I’m already shutting down the gas link and they offer to upgrade my cable service. Offer – for a price. A bigger-than- typical envelope in the mail, with big all-kindsa letters and red paper colors, pushing a Just For You deal. Over four hundred channels, from all around the world, and lots in HD. Movie channels, sports channels – national and regional, dozens of those – channels in French and Chinese, even in Greek, and Korean. And Latvian. A channel from Haiti. Weather, home shopping. Oxygen. The Africa Channel.

  What I want to know is if it’s the same company. Because I also got an offer in my new place in Baton Rouge, good time to buy down there. It was under the front door just as soon as the house-people got my deposit, mostly the same-looking envelope, and pretty much exactly the same stuffing inside. Don’t got to take it, it’s more expensive in Louisiana, six dollars a month?, but I’m pretty damn sure – I can guarantee you – the option will be there when I go back down.

  Actually, there are more channels down there, I think. Over six hundred and fifty, I think they said.

  Shew. Six hundred and fifty channels.

  Amazing what they can do.

  It would be amaze—

  But it’s cheaper here. I’d save—

  Yes, but would it still be cheaper proportionate to the fewer channels …?

  But the extra channels down south, maybe they’re all like shopping and daytime dramas and cook—

  Get the hell out of my—

  —Drat, out of milk. Need it, my coffee, and for 9 p.m., my half-glass then. Still a place in town where you can pick a carton up: OK, make a trip. To my bedroom for a shirt and my Levis, also better put on a bra, open the bedroom door and the cold yellow from the window and shoot, you know …

  Why bother? What – why am I …?

  Gotta take all this and this off and put on a lot of clean clothes, with the shivering, up over my head and all hooo chilly on my shoulders and sides …

  What am I …? My house dress OK. It’ll be fine. It’s clean. Under a coat. My house dress is presentable, enough, it’s nice brown and it’s warm and who’s looking?

  So. So I go. I go get the milk. Good. The keys, where? And if they are looking today, they sure as hell won’t be looking tomorrow—

  —Point is, I am becoming greater. The faster you move, the heavier you become. It’s the law of the universe. Just ask the physicists. You literally gain mass, substance, implication, consequence. You auto-transform in a host of positive ways. With everything I do these days, I am becoming—

  —Don’t care. Who’s minding? Who’ll get hit? Who’s shoes are gonna see the curb-edge? The city’ll take care of it before long, or the rain. I’ve done it hundreds of times, hundreds, and it made me flinch every single time. Bending and reaching and touching and enough. I’ve had enough. Remembering the plastic bags or, horror, the tissues. Disposing of the stuff. Roxy sure as hell won’t care. Probably’ll prefer it, more stink for next time. Dog ego ecstatic.

  Here’s my new ritual: letting go of a ritual that I want nothing to do with—

  Finally, a reason for a fiesta. Carol and Rick show up this Wednesday morning and, installed and placed impressively parallel to the edges of their desks, the computers. X weeks late. But therefore, both realize, exponentially more appreciated. Carol wonders: a John Fallows stratagem? They’re HP TouchSmarts running Windows Vista, and Rick knows both. His regression analysis of callback patterns will wait. In less than two hours, the twin desktops are on top of everything the universe can deliver.

  Both think it, neither say: maybe the computers will reverse the tide. Add efficiencies that will notch their labors up to acceptable performance minima. Push the team past a threshold of inspiration. Engender, somehow, productivity.

  The prior Friday, they had marked another event: fifty percent of their contracts had dissolved. Rick was the one who had noticed; he’s good with numbers – sometimes too good. All told, during their eight weeks up, they had made eighteen placements; nine remain. They learned of last Friday’s fall-apart indirectly, when they followed u
p on late payment with both employer – a dry cleaner on Sears Lane – and employee – friend Stan – and received, as explanations from both, unanswered phones.

  It wasn’t much of a surprise. The town has gone ghosty, waterthin, a progressive sapping unto stasis. Yes, there is mass and energy – folks on streets, exchanges planned and spontaneous – but this human stirring no longer seems to coalesce into knit purposefulness – to matter. The activity just seems to illustrate lack of activity. And this emptying has been reflected in their office’s experience, however microscopic: Carol and Rick are making fewer new contacts, though a greater number of unsolicited applications for work are coming in. There are fewer matches being made. Fewer contracts signed. More doubts unarticulated.

  That means they can not replace Ian. That means that hitting the light switch in the morning brings, to them both, nudges of inner darkness. On Monday, Carol dropped – shattered – a glass vase and was soon going on about Rick’s taking extended lunches. The same day, neither telephoned the other at night.

  But now the computers are here, and, with them, renegotiated possibility.

  —So listen, listen to this, just saw it: Parthian’s, the cafe on Main with the tables and chairs turned towards the Street so they could take in the spectacle? – the spectacle of the stop-starts and the hollers and the overfreighted sedans – well, they have gone the way of – what was the name of that new store or business or whatever it was on Brookes Avenue?, oh yeah, the Permanence Parlor—

  —So the FedEx guy shows up, OK?, there’s the doorbell and that’s him, I’m using FedEx all the time now because you can’t really count on the postal office, but also because, you know, they’re good. Almost never miss. You want something, you need it when you need it, you get it next day. Before 10 a.m. if you want it like that. Get antsy and need to track your package fifteen minutes after you’ve given it up, you get a full accounting, almost real-time. Sometime I see the same guys at my door, but often it’s a new face, how they find this place I don’t know, they’re really good, thank heaven for GPS.

  But today, you know, funny, it’s the young delivery man with that real black hair, the large round face and the earring. And he hands me the box with the walking shoes I ordered from way over in Oregon, no signature required this time, and he just smiles and says Here you go, sir, then twists on his heel and lopes back to his truck, purring at curbside. Just nice and efficient and professional and friendly, like usual, guys keeping things moving, that’s how they can do it.

  I watch him jump back into his truck, the front part there doesn’t have a door, and he looks over, through where the door should be, and I wave and call out thanks, and as he takes off I see a white piece of paper on my stoop. Just lying there at an angle on a step, so of course I walk out and pick it up, from two steps beneath. And I see, you know, the FedEx label on it, along with the heading Route Alert. So, funny, I read it, and:

  When making deliveries in and around the area of Anderburg, keep client communications short and sweet. Be courteous, but do not, for example, accept invitations to have a cup of coffee or share a snack. Keep conversations brief, and stay vigilant against being drawn into longer discussions not related to FedEx™ service. If a situation develops, show clients your routing list. Carry a wristwatch, and be prepared to use it. For repeat incidents, speak to Reggie at the distribution center. A donut, glazed or otherwise, does not justify delay.

  Well.

  I mean, yeah.

  Hey, I got my new Oregon shoes.

  I mean, sure glad I didn’t call out thanks a lot—

  —But of course. We’re joining the future. Everything everywhere turning into bits, into dust, to data, to imperishable prickles, and now we are too. Because we want to – here, please, it’s our turn, our grabbed chance. I chuck out my son’s model railroad and it passes into permanence. I put socks in a suitcase and they continue their lamentable descent. Existence is contingency; absence pure potential. We are replacing all dimension with time.

  It must happen here, when here is transvestite everywhere. And so we vanish. Do you get this?: Fear of vanishing begets vanishing. For by vanishing we become stronger – we become eternal. Dematerializing, we find diamond-solidity. Anti-dimension can only expand. Non-being is the best defense. Only absence lasts forever.

  So, we up for …?, Carol says, sitting down with plates, forks, and the remains of the date-nut cake she had brought in yesterday. She knows it’s obvious: she’s leveraging the computer celebration, hoping to unsag spirits. No matter. Rick sits across the table from her. Date-nut cake, whatever its context, is still date-nut cake.

  So, to our distinguished new colleagues, we say welcome, Carol says. They’re smarter than we are, less wrinkled than we are, and when you tickle them, they respond by laughing the whole of the creation onto their screens.

  Or channeling the chaos, Rick says.

  Not so, Carol says. Replacing one chaos with another. Well, whatever they’re doing, it’s nice that John finally came through.

  After the snack, Rick tutors Carol. They get into booting, shortcutting, accessing, formatting, displaying, and the rest, and culminate with the sesame of Wi-Fi codes. He starts in about a spreadsheet he had constructed, puts it off for another day.

  Carol is diligent. She starts to import pertinent e-mails and uploaded files from her private Hotmail account to the office’s new, shared Gmail site. In one subject line, she catches a reference to a phone call she had put in to a White Street grounds- and gutter-cleaning service, and makes a note that she had forgotten to follow up. She finds the courage to send off yet another reminder – it’s number three – to an office-staffing company that had promised her an audience. This gadget, she thinks, is the new bringer of fire.

  Around four thirty, she checks Gmail and finds a note labeled JK Fallows. When she opens it, she sees a distribution list that must count one hundred and fifty names, in tiny font. She starts to read:

  Hey, Everybody—

  Fuck, she says.

  —Yeah, I remember Halloween. I used to love it, the groups of kids tramping around in costumes – witches, skeletons, Supermans in supersuits that don’t hang right, Catfish Hunter, ghoulish Nixons, nonsense homemade improvs – and the doorbell sounding and Trick or Treat! and giving out Lik-M-Aid or little Snickers or one-bite Tootsie Rolls. So sweet, it was. Really, it was just so nice.

  Then it withered, cyanide candy corns, razor blades in apples, invitations to come inside, super-uptight parents and damn, the kids disappeared. But it came back just a few years later, with moms as chaperones, sometimes two or three of them standing gabbing at the curb as their kids approached the houses, or gliding along beside the sugar-hunters in a sloooow-moving car.

  And now, this year, shit man shit, I heard it was cancelled. By City Hall. Declared illegal, or, like, banned. Halloween! Can you imagine that anyone would ever outlaw trick-or-treating? Going around and asking your neighbor for something sweet? The excuse we give ourselves to do something nice?

  Sucks.

  And it was like around 4 p.m. today, Halloween day, and I was sitting on the couch by my main living-room window, looking through the bushes out to the Street … And I’m hanging there and I’m thinking about this and it’s like: Yo. They didn’t have to spend government money on this one—

  Hey, Everybody—

  Firstly, my apologies for this highly impersonal communication, but as I know that every one of you is a monster of efficiency, I hope and trust you’ll understand.

  After seven fabulous years working with you all in and for Anderburg, I was feeling the need for new challenges, something to energize me in different ways. It wasn’t a decision I made easily. But when—

  Carol swivels from the screen. She rises from her chair.

  What’s up, honey?, Rick says.

  Carol goes to the broad window, looks into slanting late- afternoon oranges – streaming from the sky on channels of pearl, backlighting scribbly twigs and diehar
d dried-out leaves. She does not turn back.

  Why are we doing this?, she says. It’s insane – it’s absurd. We have no chance at all. In any way.

  Rick goes to her. Car—

  This – this whole thing has been like someone’s bad dream, Carol says. We never had a chance. I mean—

  Please, Car—

  What can we expect to accomplish here? We started with nothing and ended with fucking less. Spilling our time on desperation and calling it idealism. Man, the most productive thing we can do is use these nice new computers to calculate our failure.

  Rick takes her in an embrace. He kisses the back of her head.

  Hey: negativity. From you?, he says. Come on, girl. What worthwhile thing isn’t, like, impossibly difficult?

  Yeah, Carol says. But now even John—

  I know, Rick says. I saw the e-mail.

  He tightens his hold. Listen, C, he says. We can’t let it get to us, OK? We’re here, now, we’ve built something valuable, and we can make a difference, OK? Absolutely – we can. We have institutional support. The sadness is not going to go on forever.

  Carol turns to him. She accepts his embrace, hugs in return. She looks up to his constant brown eyes, lowers, looks back at the solid horizontal of his shoulder.

  Thanks, man, she then says. I know you’re right. I can’t feel it just at the moment, but, man, you know whereof the real things speak.

  After the kiss, Carol twists away. OK, she says. Let’s attack those telephones—

  —What is the preceding unsaid, the imposed premise in whose conditions we rattle, the implicit postulate that, with our every whim and volition and gesture, we continue, modify, extend, affirm, even through de-affirming it? What is that statement, that referent, that no one will say, or can say with rigor and conviction? The central and determining predicate that can no longer be brought forth? Why can we never get to the one organizing proposition that, in no uncertain terms, will—