Apex Hides the Hurt

by Colson Whitehead

  Even he had to admire the wonder of it all. The great rainbow of our skins. It was a terrain so far uncharted. Pith helmets necessary. The fashioners of clear adhesive strips almost recognized this but didn’t take the idea far enough. The world of the clear strip was raceless; it did not take into account that we sought ourselves, like sought like, that a white square of white cotton wadding attached to transparent tape dispelled the very illusion they attempted to create. Criminy—an alien square of white on the skin, well that was outside the pale of even the albinoest albino. The deep psychic wounds of history and the more recent gashes ripped by the present, all of these could be covered by this wonderful, unnamed multicultural adhesive bandage. It erased. Huzzah.

  When the consultant looked down at his arm, what did he see? Was the man his color, something else, was he flesh-colored? When the man looked down at his arm, did he observe business opportunities, an unexploited niche, an overlooked market, or something else? The man saw the same thing he saw. The job.

  . . . . . . . .

  Friday morning he stood before the plywood fence, looking at the COMING SOON OUTFIT OUTLET sign. Head cocked, dumb gaze, stalled mid-step: any observer would have translated his body language into the universal pose of lost. Reception’s directions had led him to this spot. He looked up and down the street, but didn’t see where he could have made the mistake.

  A door in the fence scraped inward, revealing a scruffy young white dude whose wrecked posture, rumpled clothes, and shallow expression marked a life of few prospects, and fewer misgivings about the lack of said prospects. An existence lived in the safety and hospitality of that protected nature preserve called the American Middle Class. The name Skip was embroidered over the left breast of his striped mechanic’s shirt, which meant in all probability his name was not Skip. Not Skip awkwardly steered a dolly onto the sidewalk, grunting.

  He informed Not Skip that he was looking for the library.

  The dude set the dolly level, his hand anxiously frisking the stack of boxes to ensure they did not tumble, and jerked his head toward the door. “They’re closed,” he mumbled. “But you can see for yourself if you don’t believe me.”

  Not Skip struggled past him and he glanced up at the Latin phrase engraved above the Winthrop Library’s doorway. That was going to have to go, unless it was Latin for Try Our New Stirrup Pants. Probably not the first time one of his clients had displaced a library, and probably not the last.

  On the rare occasions that he entered libraries, he always felt assured of his virtue. If they figured out how to distill essence of library into a convenient delivery system—a piece of gum or a gelcap, for example—he would consume it eagerly, relieved to be finished with more taxing methods of virtue gratification. Helping little old ladies across the street. Giving tourists directions. Libraries. Alas there would be no warm feeling of satisfaction today. The place was a husk. The books were gone. Where he would usually be intimidated by an army of daunting spines, there were only dust-ball rinds and Dewey decimal grave markers. As if by consensus, all the educational posters and maps had cast out their top right-hand corner tacks, so that their undersides bowed over like blades of grass. Nothing would be referenced this afternoon, save indomitable market forces.

  Even the globe was gone. Over there on a table in the corner he saw the stand, the bronze pincers that once held the world in place, but the world was gone. Next to the stand he spied a small messy pile of books with colorful spines, which he momentarily mistook for a pile of This Month’s Sweaters, mussed by grubby consumers and waiting for the soothing, loving ministrations of the salesgirl.

  “We’re not open,” she said. “Middle of next week we’ll be open around the corner.” She rounded a bank of desolate shelves, this young white chick with dyed black hair, the twenty or forty bracelets on her wrists jangling like the keys of a prison guard. Salesgirl or librarian? She dropped a load of children’s books on a desk, and wheezed loudly, out of proportion to her burden. Her clothes were dull gray where the light hit them, the faded favorite gray of jet-black clothes washed too many times. He didn’t peg her as homegrown talent, and she made an unlikely librarian, stereotype-wise. Nonetheless, he decided: One bracelet for every shush.

  “Oh,” he said.

  “Come back next week for all your shopping needs,” she said. “If you need to use the Web, you’re welcome to,” she added, brushing dust off her skirt. “They want us to keep ’em on until we have to turn ’em off.” Along the back wall there was a line of six computers, their cursors blinking impatiently. A pyramid of books anchored one side of the computer table, with one copy face-out on top in the apex, and he recognized the cover of Lucky Aberdeen’s autobiography, Lucky Break: How a Small-Town Boy Took On Corporate America—and Won! Above the computers, the bowed-over corner of a promotional poster obscured the final few words of Lucky’s motto, which, conveniently, was also the publicity tagline: DREAMING IS A CINCH WHEN YOU—

  He asked if there were digital archives on the town’s history, which did not strike him as a funny question, certainly not worthy of a smirk. “No one’s ever asked that question before,” she told him, “not ever. All the stuff we have is in good old-fashioned books. And it’s in boxes. You have to come back next week.” Perhaps his face revealed something, although when he reviewed the encounter later, he felt confident that he had not slipped. It was ridiculous to think that he had registered disappointment over something as unimportant as a job. More likely, her librarian instincts had awakened after days of packing things up. She asked, “Is there something in particular you’re looking for?”

  “I wanted to find anything about the law on changing the name of the town.”

  She made the connection and her face brightened. “You’re that outside consultant, right? I heard about you.” He’d never heard someone say that particular c word with such relish. “What do you want to know?” she offered. “I’m the one who did all the legwork on that for Lucky.” She straightened, and if she wore glasses she would have slid them up her nose. “Who else are you going to ask but the town librarian?”

  “Some general background on the switch to Winthrop from Freedom,” he said.

  “It happened in this very room,” she said, suddenly center stage on the set of a public television documentary. “This was the town hall before it was the library. There were three people on the city council—Goode and Field, the two black guys who first settled here, and Sterling Winthrop, he of the barbed-wire fortune. Have you met Albie, yet?”

  “He’s everybody’s uncle.”

  She snorted. “It was basically a business deal, really,” she said. “The Light and the Dark had claim to the land. There—”

  He interrupted her. “What was that Light?”

  “The Light and the Dark were Goode’s and Field’s nicknames,” she explained. “Goode was the sunny-disposition guy and Field was the grumpy one. Like the Odd Couple. So that’s how they got their nicknames.”

  The Light, the Dark. Freedom. My people, my people. Regina’s forebears were the laziest namers he’d ever come across. He grimaced and asked her to continue with her story.

  The librarian told him that there were a lot of black towns in the state at that point in time. “If everything wasn’t packed up, I could show you some really interesting stuff about the all-black towns around here,” she lamented. “Winthrop comes along and falls in love with the area—that river traffic, at any rate—and so they decided to make it all legal. I think it was hard to argue with the kind of access Winthrop’d provide to the outside world—having a white guy up front—so they got together to incorporate the town. Drew up a town charter, elected themselves the town council, and got all their ducks in a row.”

  “Might as well go with the devil you know.”

  “He wasn’t going to hassle them or lynch them or burn them out or whatever, and at that point you needed a certain number of citizens in order to incorporate and be officially recognized by the state. Th
ere was a whole community already here to pump up the numbers. Both sides got something out of it.”

  “So why the law, then?” he asked. “Why not go change the name outright? They were the village elders.” The question had been bothering him, and the previous night before going to sleep, he’d hit the books to answer it. While he’d learned plenty about barbed wire, and smelting patents, and the long-range vision of a certain entrepreneur, all he’d found of his quarry were suspicious don’t-look-too-close constructions. They decided to change the name. The name was changed. Wording and phrasing familiar as the essential grammar of modern business.

  “I think the people liked the name Freedom,” she said, shrugging. “It sounds corny, but it meant something to them. A couple of years earlier, they’d been slaves. Now they had rights, they were official. They liked being citizens, and citizens have a government with rules and whatnot. The way I interpreted it is, Goode and Field wanted to do it right. Do it by the book. Made it a law, made it legal, and then voted to change the name.”

  Something sounded off to him, but he didn’t pursue it. He heard Not Skip bang his way through the door. The librarian gave the kid a look and he rolled his way out of sight. “We’re going to be here all weekend at this rate,” she complained.

  “What do you think of this name-change business?” he asked.

  “Now or back then?”

  “Now, Lucky’s thing.”

  She shrugged, halfheartedly this time, her pure apathy undermining the very expression of apathy. Slimpies: Ready-to-Wear Shrugs for When You Just Don’t Have It in You. “He’s the boss man,” she drawled. It turned out Lucky had lured her to Winthrop a few years ago. There had been a file-sharing program Lucky was very keen on, and she was part of a team brought in to dig around in the kernel and try to figure out how it worked.

  “Rip it off.”

  “Sure. And we worked for a few weeks, and then Lucky informed the team that he’d bought the company outright. I had just moved down, and I didn’t want to go back, so I took this job.” She pursed her lips. “You can’t blame Lucky for being Lucky,” she said evenly. “It’s like blaming water for being wet. This job’s not so bad. Mostly I tell people how to use the browsers and make sure the kids aren’t looking for porn. When Lucky asked me to do a little background on the olden days, I was pretty happy to have something to do. ‘Can I get some intel on this name thing?’ ” she said, imitating him. “That doesn’t mean I’m all up in his Kool-Aid, if you know what I mean.”

  “Yup.”

  She sighed, her eyes drifting to the empty stacks, and she was reminded of her task. “Anything else?” she asked.

  Something in her movements jostled a heavy-lidded thing in his brain stem, and he had a very concrete image of the librarian in her bedroom, on her bed, leaning back, bit of thigh, little feather of panties just visible. He realized it was his first sexual thought in months, not counting what had been wrought by that damned series of shampoo commercials. The shampoo commercial as arena for erotic play had alternately vexed and titillated him during his convalescence.

  She said, “Hey,” and he said, “Sorry?”

  “I said, the old archives are in the new building already, but if I come across the box, I’ll let you know. If you want to look for yourself.”

  He thanked her and wished her good luck.

  As he reached the door, she yelled after him. “You should try a cane. Canes are cool.”

  He looked back and gave her a brief nod. “Maybe I will,” he said, even though he’d already done the cane thing, months ago. It didn’t take.

  . . . . . . . .

  It was easy. Apex.

  He had been saving Apex for a while. It had come to him in a dream that everything was Apex.

  Of course the summit, human achievement, the best of civilization, and of course something you could tumble off of, fall fast.

  Was: waterproof, flexible, multicultural, recommended by four out of five doctors in a highly selective survey.

  Apex was a name you could rely on.

  The little part on the top of the pyramid, tons of stone dragged across the sand to make this thing. The eye on the top of the pyramid as it appears on the dollar bill. He had heard this was a symbol of immense power according to mystics. What the mystics saw was Apex. It was the currency of the world.

  In its natural state, it possessed one of the great product kickers of our time. The holy ex. A classic.

  Take it for a spin—it was good to go.

  We try to give you a glimpse of your unattainable selves. Keeps you docile.

  And when their skin was cut by roses or knives or lovers' words they reached for Apex.

  That great grand plosive second syllable. Quite the motherfucker, that.

  Not too bad for chanting, either, he thought. Repeated to fascistic crescendo, on flags around the square, streaming from streetlamps and across the backs of horses and flapping from the top of the elegant plaza in benign intensity.

  The clients came to the office, genuflecting, this or that object on its velvet bed, polished of human fingerprints in the cab on the way to the meeting. None of those things deserved Apex so he kept the name tight, looking over his shoulder as he spun the combination to the safe to make sure it was still where he kept it. No one knew of his treasure and he thought: One day.

  Didn’t history rise to a point? Couldn’t they look down from today and survey all that had come before, all that little stuff we squinted at that was not special and so far away, and pronounce ourselves Apex?

  He saw the first ads for Apex. They said Apex Hides the Hurt, and he said, of course it does.

  . . . . . . . .

  On his return from the library, he had to squeeze past all the pretty shuttle buses queued up in front of the hotel. They idled, hummed, and almost curtsied, it seemed to him. He sighed. Some people went in for driftwood, others were suckers for cellar door, but as far as commonplace word units went, he had always been rather fond of shuttle bus, and back in his office days had spent many an afternoon advocating its case.

  The sound of everyday things was a constant topic, with regard to what they might occasionally chisel off the mundane, but that was just pretext for him. Say it five times fast, he maintained—shuttle bus shuttle bus sounded like leaves whispering to each other in your textbook primordial glen. Never mind the initial mental image of the ungainly vehicle, and its battle between intimacy and utility—a shuttle bus approaches grace on the asphalt of humility, he insisted. Inevitably, his colleagues shook their heads when he got to that part, but he never wavered. As perfect containers of that moment between anticipation and event, as roving four-wheeled or six-wheeled conveyances of hope, shuttle buses cannot be blamed if the destination disappoints, if desire is counterfeited, if after all that dreaming all we have to show are ashes. Shuttle buses, at worst, were unwitting accomplices. Being a shuttle bus, he argued, meant never having to say you were sorry. He always expected applause when he finished.

  So he felt nostalgic about the old days for a minute there, as he watched Lucky’s pilgrims vibrate before the little shuttle buses. They parsed the signs taped below the bubble windows, searching for the names of their chosen diversions: THE GOLFING EXPERIENCE, BUBBLING BROOK SPA AND MENTAL RELAXATION CLINIC, AU NATUREL. He wondered how many miles away these places were, how far into the region Lucky had reached in order to pull these people to his breast. Every half-baked amusement for fifty miles around had probably been conscripted to his purpose. He had half a notion to slip on board one of these chariots—Thinkin’ ’Bout Spelunkin’ or Take a Hike—and lose himself with the others.

  Instead, he took a seat on one of the uncomfortable red sofas in the lobby. The housekeeper needed more time. His trip to the library had been shorter than he’d calculated, and he didn’t want to risk another encounter with She of the Rolling Doom. Better give it twenty minutes, he decided, and he felt a knot or two beneath his shoulder blades ease. It was nice to have a nemesis�
��on that point there could be no disagreement—but this feeling went beyond the usual joy of combat with a mortal enemy, of having a constant companion through gripe and grudge. The housekeeper was turning out to be a convenient lightning rod, drawing off excess hostility and resentment. He couldn’t take it out on his clients; that would be unprofessional. Masterstroke here was to use her as she was using him: as scapegoat and punching bag for unruly stuff best undirected, for now, at the true targets. He took a deep breath, heard a voice from his single yoga class years ago and held that breath, stretching his arms luxuriously. Shuttle bus, shuttle bus, he whispered. Ah, forget the spa, forget the oatmeal soaps and obscure incenses. He was feeling better already.

  Taken with the novelty of this feeling of well-being, he didn’t notice the little white man standing over him until the flash blinded him. He was thoroughly startled, his arms and legs jerking ridiculously. His perimeter of personal space had expanded in the months since his misfortune, and this specimen, with his nefarious digital camera, had crossed the line so quickly and efficiently that he cursed himself for such a grave security lapse. Later that afternoon, when he considered the border of his personal space, he reckoned that it was not so much a perfect circle, as commonly thought, but an irregular blob shape, jellyfishy hither and yon, and constantly shifting.

  “I was told you might be available for an interview?” the man said, depositing the camera in a pocket and withdrawing his card in one agile movement. He had the pale, narrowed features of some burrowing creature, a scraper of soil, no close friend of daylight. The tiny eyeglasses civilized him, promoting him to a talking burrowing creature of children’s books, an officious supporting player, Sir Gary Groundhog or Postulating Possum. His name in fact was Jurgen Cross, and the card contained a phone number and an e-mail address, but no other specifics. “I’m writing a feature about Aberdeen and Lucky for the Daily Register,” Jurgen chirped, “and was told you might offer up a few words?”