Apex Hides the Hurt

by Colson Whitehead

  Statistically speaking, a good part of the Western world has played with Ehko. It was one of the most popular toys in the world. The plastic pieces came in different interlocking shapes, the same four or five hues. Once you learned how to hook the pieces together with that little snap sound, you yourself were hooked for a good stretch of childhood. The tiny bricks were easily misplaced, but the kits came with extras and the prodigal pieces returned eventually, coaxed by brooms, even if it took years.

  On the sides of the boxes were pictures of things you could make out of Ehko bricks if you followed the example, and for a while the kids followed the example. Then they found out that the fun part was making their own bizarre creations. Deviating from the blueprints. The toy was plastic and so was its meaning. He figured there was some mathematical way of determining the exact number of permutations, but the overall impression was that there was no end to what you can make out of Ehko. Parents who played with Ehko as children bought the kits for their own children, and Ehko was passed down alongside morals and prejudices and genetic predisposition to certain illnesses.

  The march of time. Over the years, Ehko International started stamping out more extravagant sets, like Ehko Stock Car Racing Track and Ehko Metro Hospital. Again, the kids could follow the plans and make a sterling HMO, or stray and come up with their own, more realistic concoctions, like a hospital without a waiting room, or one equipped with a particularly large morgue. The bricks as the very components of imagination. Every year the company unleashed another dozen sets, each new batch more baroque and complicated than the last: Ehko Andromeda Space Station, Ehko Lost City of Atlantis. Made wistful by the cumbersome boxes they hoisted from the toy store, parents wrote to Ehko International inquiring about the simple kits of their youth. One such favorite was Ehko Village.

  Ehko Village had been quite popular during the fifties and early sixties. The Town Hall, the Fire Station, the Church, easily replicable from diagrams, addressed innate notions. Something about this country. But alas the counterculture, the political tumult, the odd riot put a kibosh on sales. Times had changed, but the letters from the now grown-up architects of Ehko Village told the corporation that maybe an update was in order. Being Swiss, they had a very reliable system of dealing with customer feedback. Sentiment rattled its cage. Maybe, they thought, the same concept would fly again, if reworked a bit. But they definitely needed a new name.

  He met the Ehko team in the conference room and they outlined their plans, these Swiss people. They were a flock of blond birds, misled by the wind to a city where the going rate was mongrel pigeon. He pretended to listen but the whole time he had his eyes on the box containing the new Village. Once they were done talking he told them to ask the receptionist for some tickets to a Broadway show, if they were so inclined. Strip club passes if they weren’t. He had his own evening already mapped out.

  He took the kit home. How could he resist? The pieces fell in a clatter when he overturned the box onto his living-room floor. The proposed town as pictured on the box was an unassuming thing, compared to what the company had been churning out lately. It was out of step with the rest of the product family and out of step with the spirit of the times. It was no Ehko Boomtown Gone Bust or Ehko Ghetto. The machines, he noted, had not been configured to stamp out the little studded bricks of Ehko Abraham Lincoln Public Housing or Ehko Methadone Clinic. (He enjoyed himself more back then.) In the pictures on the box, there were no shadows in the alleys, for there were no alleys. Everything fit together snugly, and there was no place where an unruly element might find purchase.

  Some things were different, he observed, but the steps they had taken to modernize the Village pointed more toward demographic reality than slippery, more elusive concepts. The citizens of Ehko worlds were bulbous moppets with painted smiles; as they did in all their sets these days, Ehko included brown bulbs (that were not too brown) and yellow bulbs (that corresponded to some hypothetical Asian skin pigment) according to ratios informed by sales research. This new Village was integrated. And should a child desire to place a fireman’s helmet on a female Ehkotian, it would fit. No longer would pesky perms forbid entrance to the gates of equal opportunity. The shops came in wider variety, and now children could snap an ice-cream shop together or a drugstore. The bricks had not changed, however. Red white and blue bricks still waited patiently for little fingers to quicken them.

  His legs remembered the correct position for squatting down with toys. He played. He fit the round male studs into the round female grooves. He got some thinking done as he hunkered down on his fallen-asleep legs. As he cycled through an array of recombinations, his subversive attempts at city planning, the strangest things occurred to him. Sinister and malformed architecture emerged from the pile, ruins slowly revealed by shifting dunes. He could make out the police station in the rubble. If he left it there, in fragments, would there be no crime? By constructing some sort of fascistic multiplex out of the movie theater bricks, it would, according to his logic, call into creation a new cinema, one appropriate to such a venue, but what sort of films would they be? By leaving out the hospital would the citizens not die? Like the plastic of their flesh and the four letters of the name imprinted on every brick, the citizens would live forever. He could leave out the streets and jam the buildings together into a horror of overcrowding, where no one ever went outside into the poisoned atmosphere, but remained behind the walls of Ehko Dystopolis.

  From such a simple assignment, all manner of devilment popped into his head. And of course that’s what Ehko was about, he realized. The little children’s hands would be like giant’s hands, the hands of God, reaching down to the floor of the playroom, building this community and world from interlocking parts, every sure snap sound the affirmation of nature’s logic, or at the very least splendid Swiss design. Revoking order only to affirm it anew the next afternoon. The multicolored pieces spread out on the floor like the spiral arms of a galaxy. Which made him universe-big, and he wondered then, what was this toy, and what was this game?

  Eventually he followed the instructions. He felt compelled to. In the end nothing was so pleasing as the image on the cover of the box, and this was a lesson to be learned. The original idea remained in that jumble of bricks, patiently waiting.

  The kit was still in his apartment, at the top of the closet. He hadn’t the heart to throw it away.

  They hired him to make the tough calls. He returned to them Ehko Village. Which, he had to admit, didn’t seem like a tough call at all. It wouldn’t win any awards. Some people, he knew, would say: Well, you didn’t really name anything at all, we could have done that. They’d be right, but they would have done it for the wrong reasons, he countered. After Ehko Space Station Delta and Ehko Martian Invasion Armada, a trip back to Ehko Village was a bold choice. It did not need to be updated. It did not need to be renamed. We have forgotten, he told his clients, we have forgotten the old ways. And the old ways have a name, and they have a power. Malevolent imaginings might try to force those pieces into something they are not, but the name will force them into the correct and kind configuration. We are too easily unmoored these days, he said, and the name will keep us tethered. Ehko Village said values were constant, that times had changed but an idea of ourselves still remained. There is a way of life we have forgotten that is still important.

  He didn’t believe that crap, but that wasn’t important. He knew it would strike a chord. The Village was off to the side and timeless. Driving off the main highway one day you might find it and wile away a few hours savoring it. The very name Ehko, after all, what was it? It was what we knew bounced back at us from the walls of the cave, in diminishing repetitions, until it disappeared and we were alone with a memory. So how to stop that? Ehko Village was a reverberation of America that did not grow faint with time. It was always there to play with us.

  . . . . . . . .

  True, “Why don’t you hop in and let me show you something” did sound like a come-on. Regina’s sombe
r mood throughout the last half of dinner, however, smothered the little erotic fantasia percolating in his brain at the sound of those words. As he climbed into the passenger seat, he reminded himself that he had a long-standing rule about sleeping with clients. Then he recalled that actually he had no such rule, but it would certainly complicate things, especially since she was already involved in a torrid psychological ménage with Albie and Lucky. He shuddered. They pulled away from the curb.

  She had a way of speaking that reminded him of his mother and her cousins. And he thought: Is that it? Some sort of Oedipal thing churning belowdecks? First the sexy librarian, now this. He was really hitting the sexual fetishes hard today. Tomorrow at the barbecue there will be cheerleaders around every corner, pom-poms locked and loaded. He wondered about the collective noun for a group of French maids. A stocking of French maids? A garter of French maids? Or maybe it wasn’t Oedipal at all. Maybe it was her conviction that he found sexy. He shuddered anew.

  “This is all old Winthrop,” Regina said, as they turned off the promenade. They rolled past a string of handsome folk Victorian houses. Close to the center of things and nicely porched and well hedged. What kind of view was there from the top windows? What was there to see? Space. This was the trade-off between the country and the city and he couldn’t help think: What’s the mortgage on that thing? There were rumblings his building might go co-op, so he was attuned.

  “This was the white part of town when I was growing up. Me and my girlfriends had this game we used to play when we came by here, where as soon as we got on this street we’d start screaming, ‘They’re gonna get you! They’re gonna get you!’ and run as fast as we could. There were all these old, old people on this street and I guess we found them scary.”

  He said, “Yup.”

  “Winthrop built the first of these as the factory started to take off, and then he sold them to people who moved here. Once the town got incorporated, it really took off. Merchants started setting up shop, whatnot. Winthrop would sell the houses, and then buy them back, then sell them to new people.”

  “That’s some old-school shit.”

  “Yeah,” she said, chuckling. “But then the last ten years, Albie has sold it all off bit by bit. There’ll be no buying it back. It’s all Lucky’s now, or the new people. I could point to each one of these houses and say, this used to be Winthrop and that used to be Winthrop, but at this point, I think more of Lucky and the new people than I think of Albie and his family. It hasn’t been that long, but that’s the way it is.”

  It must be like selling little pieces of yourself. And what would that do to you? They turned off Elm and onto Virginia. “That’s probably what made him crazy,” he said.

  She whistled. “Like I said before, he was always a little off. Like those crazy British princes, the ones that are all nuts from generations of people marrying their cousins. Not that I’m blaming incest or anything. Maybe all royalty is crazy. That’s the price after a while.” Her eyes narrowed. “His wife was the last straw. I liked her. Everybody bad-mouths her, but she was always nice to me. Took everything but Albie’s pants in the divorce, though.”

  “I saw his house.”

  “So you know. Yeah, he wasn’t right after they split, but he wasn’t that right before they split.” She pointed out the window. “That Queen Anne over there they cut up into apartments for the computer people. Had a stalking complaint there last spring, so I got to see the inside. They did a nice job with it. The appliances.”

  They rounded a corner and the homes grew more modest and modern, ranch houses with the occasional two-story wood frame thrown in. “This is still mostly a black part of Winthrop, but a lot of the new people are moving up Reginald Street. Especially lately.”

  He looked at the SUVs and Volvos in the driveways and superimposed wagons and hitching posts. Were the Goode and Field patriarchs as real-estate savvy as Winthrop? Did they have the same kind of arrangement with black settlers who came later, like Winthrop had with his laborers and whatnot? He didn’t think it would be a polite question to ask, even if Regina hadn’t appeared to be in some sort of trance. She slowed the car to a crawl and her eyes prowled the fronts of all the houses, looking for something. She said, “You asked me in the restaurant when I changed my mind. I didn’t know I was going to do it until I did it. Until it came time to vote.” Perhaps she was superimposing her own images on what was there now, placing the faces of relatives and old friends. Her dead.

  “I started thinking of changing the signs,” she started. “Because you have to change everything, right? The street signs and then the letterhead in the office. And who would pay for it. I thought: It’s Lucky’s baby, so let him pay for it. It’s his, like before it was Winthrop’s. It’s been done before. And—it was a lie. That’s what it is, isn’t it? If I ask you your name and you tell me something other than what it is, that’s a lie. We got to the conference table and I looked at those two men I’ve known my whole life, and I thought: This is wrong.” She turned to face him, her expression fixed. “It should go back to Freedom. That’s its true name.”

  They were at the intersection of Reginald and Regina. “Winthrop’s not the only royalty in town, huh?” he said.

  “My brother is named Reginald, too. Maybe you’ll meet him and his wife before you leave. Everybody in my family is named after someone who came before. And if we didn’t know them personally, we knew them as a place we traveled on. Funny, huh? You get to the white part of town and they named the streets after the colonies, Virginia and Massachusetts and whatnot. Or trees. My mother used to ask me, ‘What started that whole mess of naming streets after trees? Didn’t they have people they loved?’ That’s how you know what part of town you’re in. Over here, the streets are people. They’re your history, your family. Richards, Nathaniel, Goode. How you know you’re home is when you see your name on the street. And if you get lost, just look for yourself.” She turned right, and he had that heading-home feeling.

  Regina didn’t speak for the rest of the ride to the hotel, leaving his eyes to jump from sign to sign. Winthrop’s Virginias and Oaks were well within character for someone hungering after the connotations of the eastern establishment, he decided. Want to import the coast to the prairie? You have to learn how to be just as dull, name by name. Whereas the black settlers had different marketing priorities. Hope crossed Liberty, past the intersection of Salvation. Better than naming the streets after what they knew before they came here. Take Kidnap to the end, make a left on Torture, and keep on ’til you get to Lynch. Follow the lights ’til you get to Genocide and stop at the dead end. Not exactly the kind of stuff that inspired positive word of mouth among prospective neighbors, unless he was so out of the loop that the phrase “We saw the prettiest little bungalow on Rape Street” was now much more upbeat than it used to be.

  What would Lucky’s map look like? Take Innovation all the way to Synergy, then hang a looey on Scalability all the way to Cross-Platform. They were almost at the town square, he could feel it. He shook his head: going native. Did it matter in the end what names they gave their roads? There were secret street names, the ones we were unaware of. The ones that only the streets themselves know. Signage vexed Regina, and well it should, he decided. Welcome to Freedom. Welcome to Winthrop. Welcome to New Prospera. Tear the old signs down, put up new ones in their place—it didn’t change the character of the place, did it? It didn’t cover up history. Not for the last time, he wondered what his clients believed they could achieve. And what exactly he was doing here.

  . . . . . . . .

  One day he stubbed his toe. In retrospect there was some inevitability tied up in said stubbing, so he came to believe that his toe wanted to be stubbed for reasons that were unknowable. Unnameable.

  The C-line apartments in his building were renowned for their spectacular troves of closet space, and as it happened he lived in 15C. Where lesser mortals were forced to retain the services of storage facilities, the C-liners rejoiced in wal
k-ins that but for a quirk of fate might have been additional bedrooms. He reserved two of those uncanny closets for the numerous boxes sent to him from grateful clients. In the boxes were gifts. Or gratuities, more like it. Little tips.

  They were things he had named. On the sides of the boxes the names loitered and slouched, matured by design teams and promotional schemes into adolescents with personalities. To look at the logos, his former charges had grown up to be flamboyantly calligraphic or dourly industrial or irreverently trendy. The standard arguments over nature and nurture applied.

  Most of the products were of no use to him. Space-age spatulas, automatic bird feeders, piquant ointments in various strengths—they represented the breadth of the world. One Christmas he sorted through the boxes, gift wrapped certain items, and sent them to loved ones. The response was less than enthusiastic and the next year he returned to gadgets and doodads. The gadgets and doodads, like his clients’ products, remained in their packages, but he was of the mind that when it came to gifts, it was the appearance of thought that counts.

  Of all the stuff in his storage closets, the only thing he had time for was Apex. It was hard to argue against the utility of an adhesive bandage and in those early days of Apex, he, like many citizens, found it near impossible to contradict the reasoning of the multicultural bandage, which so efficiently permitted the illusion of a time before the fall. When he stubbed his toe that fateful day, it was toward a box of Apex he hobbled.

  He didn’t know what tripped him up. He couldn’t remember after all that happened what he stubbed his toe on. Later he decided the specifics were not important, that the true lesson of accidents is not the how or the why, but the taken-for-granted world they exile you from. In all probability he stumbled over something small and insignificant, as is only appropriate for such a shriveled, gargoyle word like stub. He remembered going into the bathroom and reaching for the box of Apex. The box was his color; they had seen him in the office and knew his kind of brown. He sat on the toilet and removed his shoe. There was a little bit of blood on his sock, and when he pulled it away, he was surprised that his toe did not hurt more. Poor little guy! It looked terrible. The toenail tilted up out of a murk of thick blood, cotton lint, and gashed flesh. It could go either way. The nail might do a little knitting-back-together thing and heal, or it might fall off as a scab. He didn’t care. He put on an Apex.