Business

by J. P. Meyboom

  Late one September afternoon while Marla was on tour, Bernstein turned up on Yonge Street. In my old life, we sometimes drank together. He was unchanged: a wool cap pulled over his ears in a slavish salute to gangster fashion, his boxer physique draped in a hooded blue NYU sweatshirt. He saw corporate conspiracies. He argued graffiti was art. He wrote poetry and went to law school. He smelled of body odour and self-righteousness, a study in cultivated anger.

  “Bernstein,” I said, surprised to see him, “how the hell are you?”

  He shook his head in disbelief. “Paul Wint,” he said. “I didn’t recognize you there for a second. Nice suit. Who’d you screw?”

  “Life’s taken a new turn,” I said to keep it loose. “I’m fighting the system from within, as they say.”

  “Co-opted. That’s what they do to you.”

  He saw life in terms of the Revolution the rest of us knew would never come, tinted by the sanctimonious lens of an un-earned moral position and was therefore, to my mind, intellectually corrupt. But always good for a laugh over drinks.

  “You were always brighter than you let on,” he said. “You’re just too lazy for rigorous thinking. Question and meditate. It’s the only way. Why does a smart guy like you spend his time doing nothing of interest or importance?”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I know. You got the haircut.”

  “Fuck you,” I said. We both laughed. He couldn’t figure me out. Never could. I shrugged. Garlic eater. Should’ve walked on.

  “After you graduated, you had a responsibility to do serious things,” he said. “Instead, it seems you’re like everyone else who was going to save the world. Nobody did a fucking thing but line their own pockets.”

  “While you’re making the world a better place.”

  Mistake. Push play: rant on cue.

  “Fucking right. I went to the economic summit. Got my voice heard.” He jammed his hands into his pockets like he was cold. “I did my part. I set fire to a police car. Got gassed. Got arrested.”

  “Well, that sounds great, Bernstein. You’re a real revolutionary.”

  He shrugged. “You have twenty bucks?”

  “Tell you what,” I said, “I scored some coke and was thinking beer and food. I’m buying.”

  He paused, adjusted his head as if he’d absorbed a punch, and said, “Sure.”

  We installed ourselves at the first bar we came across. Some place called the Pullman, reminiscent of a nineteenth-century bar car on the Orient Express. Wood panelling. Stuffed red-velour armchairs. Shiny brass foot rails along the bar. Crystal glasses hung from an iron rack. It wasn’t my sort of place. Our regular haunts were less precious in decor and generally lacked atmosphere. We didn’t care. The Pullman was handy, and it was open.

  Inside, a portly bartender in a conductor’s uniform tugged on his magnificent curly moustache as he took drinks orders with the seriousness of a man receiving detailed instructions on how to blow up a bridge. Soon, we were set up with double Scotches and beer chasers, which we pursued for several rounds before Bernstein looked around the place with glassy eyes.

  “I need to water my snake,” he said. For someone with a degree in Italian history and two years of law school, his language often surprised me. “Where’s the head?”

  The bartender yawned and pointed toward the back at some stairs down to the basement. Bernstein retreated. At the end of the bar, he bumped into a small group, who clutched their drinks to their chests. He mumbled excuses while my hand waved over our empty glasses for another round.

  Upon his return, Bernstein said, “Those two women at the end of the bar are talking to a drunk Russian acrobat. He’s not making much sense. He’s with the Cirque du Soleil in Las Vegas. He’s a high-wire act. I think one of them likes me.”

  “The acrobat or one of the women?” I said.

  He gulped his Scotch and chewed the ice. He said, “Stay here, if you want. I’m going to talk to them.”

  Bernstein lurched back to the end of the bar and into an animated conversation. His new-found audience laughed. It was unheard of. Normally, no one laughed in a conversation with Bernstein. His arguments moved along convoluted philosophical lines beyond the ken of the uninitiated, followed by angry political tirades aimed at the People Who Run the World. After a while, he was back.

  “The Russian acrobat wants to do a line,” he said. “You’re holding, right?”

  I nodded. “And the girls?”

  He stared down the bar. “Not so much. But they’re really into me.”

  In the basement, the three of us crowded into a cubicle, where I chopped out three lines of coke with my lock knife on the lid of the toilet. Bernstein rolled up a bill that he passed to the Russian acrobat, who pushed his round hairless face onto the toilet lid and hoovered up the lines in one snort. His glossy red lips pulled back into a greedy gap-toothed snarl. A coked up, muscular Elmer Fudd.

  “Yuri crawled from mother’s pussy soaking wet,” he slurred when he was done. “It was disgusting, but never as disgusting as toilet snorting with drunks.”

  He pushed Bernstein and me hard against the stall with his tough veined hands to clear the doorway. He was strong, but too drunk and too stoned to be effective.

  “Get out of my way. Yuri don’t like your sad faces,” he said. “Yuri wants to see friends. Not you.”

  He swung his fist at me in a lame attempt to punch my head. Unexplored survival reactions shot up. One hand snapped out to block Yuri’s blow. With the other hand still clutching the open knife, I punched his throat. It all happened as if by drunken accident. The cubicle was too small for him to fall to the ground. Instead, he gasped, hands around his throat in pain, and collapsed into Bernstein’s arms. As he clung to Bernstein, who gaped at me with disbelief, Yuri’s distorted face fell close enough to mine to smell his sour vodka breath. The knife pointed at his nose like I meant to lance him. His eyes goo-goo-rolled back into his head.

  Bernstein groped behind his ass and flipped the cubicle handle, which spilled us all out into the graffiti-spattered washroom. The Russian acrobat slipped, hit his forehead on the sink, and tumbled onto the piss-drenched red tiles around the urinals. The scent of mothballs was powerful. We stared at him, unsure what to do next. I folded the knife back into my pocket. Bernstein poked the Russian with his foot.

  “Shit, I think you killed him,” Bernstein said.

  We rolled him over. Yuri moaned. A welt of blood cracked across his forehead. Coke still caked inside his flared nostrils. Urine, blood, and water haloed around his bald head.

  “He’s going to live,” I said. “Fuck him. Let’s get out of here.”

  Upstairs, the girls were oblivious to what had transpired. They stopped us at the bar.

  “What did you do with Yuri?” asked one.

  Violence was not my world. Electric currents pulsed through my body. My legs trembled. Bernstein said, “We kicked the crap out of him and left him to die on the toilet floor.”

  They laughed and returned to their business. I steadied myself against the bar while Bernstein talked them up. He was back in his groove. Too drunk to care about what had happened, he laughed with his new companions and ordered drinks for everyone. Alone across the room, I watched in disbelief. My hand quivered. Something tingled over my chest. To stop my mounting panic, I concentrated on Bernstein’s merry companions and noticed, on closer inspection, one of them sported faint five o’clock stubble. The other had a distinct Adam’s apple that bobbled up and down, nyuck, nyuck, nyuck, with laughter.

  The room swayed. I needed fuel to restore my equilibrium. On my signal, the barkeeper poured a triple, which I dispatched in a single slug. I hoped the alcohol would heal me. The tingle didn’t stop. Instead, it moved to my forearm. I was starting to tell Bernstein my suspicions about his new friends when a cockroach climbed out of my sleeve and crawled onto the bar, unseen by anyone but me. The tingle stopped. Everyone laughed at something else Bernstein said. Even the barman join
ed in the fun.

  I placed the shot glass right on top of the cockroach. It crunched and splattered on either side of the heavy crystal base. No one noticed. Downstairs, the toilet door creaked. Russian expletives wormed upstairs.

  “Bernstein” — my words rolled like loose bearings around my teeth — “really got to go.”

  Bernstein ignored me, so I put a handful of crumpled bills on the bar and left him there.

  FOUR

  The Ellington

  COCKROACHES INFESTED the Ellington. In my second-floor apartment, they crawled in and out of the kitchen cupboards, manoeuvred along the ridges of the cracked hallway mirror, emerged out of the bathtub drain, and hiked across the bed at all hours. They licked the paint off the walls, chewed the glue from the book bindings, laid eggs in the sofa, and shit inside the TV. They even lived in the underwear drawer.

  There had been a time when the Ellington was more than a roach-infested shell of a building. In the 1920s, it was one of the first apartment buildings to offer three floors of exclusive downtown living. The editor of the Telegraph had lived here, as had some famous jazz pianist and a gangster named Mickey Fingers. The building had a uniformed doorman and a servants’ entrance around the back. The apartments were lavish in size and rich in detail: polished oak floors, curved lath and plaster walls, arched doorways, and intimate coal-burning fireplaces. Day and night, fancy cars pulled up, depositing women with cigarette holders and bobs on the arms of men in double-breasted suits and fedoras saying “hooey” and “swell” and “bee’s knees.”

  Over the years, the apartments were subdivided into smaller units. The fireplaces were ripped out and the floors covered with cheap broadloom. The doorman disappeared. Hookers gave blow jobs in the servants’ entrance. The only cars likely to pull up these days were ambulances and the police.

  Even if Yuri, all coked, bloodied, and bruised, found the strength to crawl out of the toilet at the Pullman and seek revenge for my punch to his throat, he couldn’t find me. Once inside the squalid embrace of the Ellington, a cloak of invisibility covered all who entered. The building had that effect. The peeling white paint, the cracked, taped windows, and the sagging, rotten soffits suggested the Ellington was abandoned. Sometimes I walked past it myself.

  Still, once inside, I locked all three deadbolts. A baseball bat stood ready by the door. The lights stayed off. In the dark, I fumbled for a baggie of pot in a kitchen drawer. I grabbed a glass, checked it for roaches with a finger. Nothing. Under the sink, a bottle of J&B still had some life to it. I pulled a wooden chair over to the window and rolled a joint. There was no ice, but the Scotch washed down the smoke just fine.

  There was one good thing in the apartment: the ATN Night Scout Binoculars. They were a work of art. High-resolution 90 mm glass lenses. A light-intensifier tube that amplified light up to thirty-five thousand times. Five times magnification. Built-in infrared illuminator for no-light conditions. They were a gift from my dope dealer for helping him write a letter to his parole officer about why he’d missed a review meeting.

  After a second iceless Scotch, the binoculars came off the nail by the window to scope the darkness outside for signs of Yuri. An old tree on the far edge of the lot groaned as a night breeze rattled its leaves. A waxy burger wrapper curled through the lot from the Mighty Meaty across the street. Two parked cars. A man with a cup of coffee drove off in one. Its lights slashed the night. A garbage truck idled on the street. The driver dozed over his wheel. A big blond-wigged hooker in green hot pants and vinyl boots led some nervous tourist toward the servants’ entrance. She laughed. He didn’t.

  The thing with Yuri still resonated. Occasional adrenalin waves surged through me. I tried to will them away while I remained motionless by the window. Vigilant. My jaws clenched so tight my teeth practically chipped. What happened couldn’t be changed. With luck, it wouldn’t get worse.

  Eventually, the red sun bled through the darkness. To my relief, the Russian acrobat never appeared. He hadn’t captured and tortured Bernstein for my address. Most likely, he’d woken up with a bruised throat and no memory of what happened. And Bernstein was possibly in the arms of a cross-dresser, probably not for the first time. It didn’t matter. Exhausted, I went to bed fully clothed under the blanket. It may have been an imperfect situation, but this new life still beat the greeting card business.

  The phone rang a few times. A fire truck howled by. Seagulls fought for garbage outside the open window. Despite these distractions, I mostly slept through the day. Nothing broke through the surface until well into the evening, when a quiet tap tap drilled through my stupor. Polite. Persistent. Impossible to ignore. Not like when I pounded on the walls with the broom to get Mr. White next door to shut off his wretched alarm clock radio. Or like when Clive the drag queen super came for the rent, which was more of a kick at the door followed by the high-pitched growl of his ridiculous little Jack Russell. This was more like the sound of a timid but relentless mechanical device that had lost its rhythm, as if one cog in the wheel was broken. Ka-chunk. Ka-chunk.

  I stumbled off the bed, tripped on the empty whisky bottle, and fell hard on the floor. The noise stopped for a moment, then resumed with greater urgency, this time accompanied by a muffled, sonorous British African voice.

  “Paul? Paul?”

  “Who’s there?” I said through the bolted door.

  “Your neighbour across the hall in 211, Mulumba, Akinwole.”

  My hands fumbled with the deadbolts, the bat nearby in case of a trap.

  “Paul, you really must open up to me now.”

  “Yes, Akinwole, keep your shirt on. I was asleep.”

  Akinwole blotted out the door frame. His cropped bullet head streamed sweat down around his huge neck into his perfect white singlet, which was tucked into a creased pair of brown trousers. His feet were bare. A few bloodshot threads tore the whites of his eyes. He reviewed my appearance.

  “You look like shit, man.”

  “Thank you. Why are you up?”

  “It is the witch upstairs,” he said. “There are bad noises coming from her apartment upstairs again. Thumping and dragging noises that have prevented me from sleeping for several days. You must come hear for yourself.” He nodded toward his open door and shuffled his feet, impatient, like we needed to get a move on. “I am going mad in there.”

  I liked Akinwole. He was a good neighbour. We kept an eye on each other’s mailboxes and exchanged pleasantries in the hall. Once in a while I’d invite him in to share a drink. Like me, he lived alone and seemed to be adrift in a crazy world, which he faced as best he could.

  “Akinwole,” I said, “there’s no witch. There’s no noise besides the usual night sounds. You’re stressed and overworked. Try a day off once in a while. I’m going back to sleep.”

  “Do not be like that, Paul. You are my neighbour and my friend, but you are sometimes an asshole. Come.”

  He took my arm and led me across the hall into his apartment. It was a mirror layout to mine. We went into the living room. An exposed bulb dangled by a wire from the ceiling. Otherwise, the room was bare except for a leather La-Z-Boy. All was quiet. I groaned and dropped into the armchair. Nauseated.

  “Have you got anything to drink? I don’t feel good. I’m dizzy.”

  Akinwole didn’t care. “Listen.” He pointed to the ceiling. Nothing.

  “I need a Scotch and some Advil,” I said. “I’m in no mood for this.”

  Disgusted, he shook his head and retreated to the kitchen. Glass bottles tinkled with the sound of the fridge door being yanked open.

  “I am getting you some nice cold water,” he said from the other room. “You will find its restorative properties better for you than whatever you have been drinking.”

  I closed my eyes. Akinwole’s voice droned. Water gurgled. Glass clinked some more. Then a distinct low rumble started in the ceiling. Something thumped, deep and ominous.

  When I looked up, Akinwole stood over me, swirled ice wate
r in a glass, and passed it over.

  “Hear that? How much more of that can I take?” He ran his huge pink palms over his head. “At home we would certainly have sorted her out by now.”

  “Sorted her out?” The ice water offset my urge to throw up. “You’re going to find yourself on a plane back to the Congo, or worse.”

  Akinwole sighed. “I know you do not feel it, but some sort of response is required.”

  “Go up there and tell her the noise bothers you. Nicely. That’s how we sort it out.”

  His lower lip trembled. “You think this is foolishness, but I feel danger. You must speak to her for me.” He reeked sour and crazy. He rolled his eyes at the ceiling to make sure nothing came through for him at that exact moment. The noise was dull and repetitive.

  “I’m not sure I should be talking to a witch on your behalf.”

  The dope, the whisky, and the lack of food made it near impossible for me to care much longer. Teeth clenched, I fought the urge to pass out. One of these days soon this business needed to stop.

  “You people are so cold and rational here. You have no blood in your veins. No souls.” He stood over by the curtainless window, a shadow in the shadow. “I wish I’d never left Kinshasa. That place was a shithole, but at least I understood it. Here, I go to work. I come home. Eat processed foods that upset my stomach before I go to bed. I work and I sleep. I make other people rich. I am a slave. I miss the sun and the dust and the smell of food cooked outside. Devils are eating me from the inside.”

  “Welcome to the land of milk and honey. Not what you expected, Akinwole?” I said. “Was it supposed to be Cadillacs, cocktails, and big mansions? The good life? Streets paved with gold?”

  Blue veins as thick as worms bugged out of his head. Maybe, I thought, I should get out of his orbit in case his craziness was contagious. He peered at the late-night traffic outside the Ellington. He raised his arms with an imaginary rifle pointed into the street.