Apex Hides the Hurt

by Colson Whitehead

  Which toe was it? One of the shy ones, not the big toe, or the middle, but the one next to the pinky. It sat at the back of the class and did its homework, not likely to be voted anything. Never Best this, or Most Likely to that. The brown adhesive bandage was such a perfect tone that it looked as if he’d never had a toenail at all. That he had never stumbled.

  Did it hide the hurt? Most assuredly so.

  . . . . . . . .

  He was fortunate the next morning that his bed was big enough to accommodate both hemispheres of his hangover. He’d wake up for a few minutes to experience paranoid hangover (these people are out to destroy me), then fall asleep and wake up half an hour later way on the other side of the king-size bed, enduring anxiety hangover (if I weren’t so worthless, these people would not be out to destroy me). He rolled back and forth across the bed, between maladies, disparate throes, for most of the a.m., ruing his decision to partake of the free shots offered by the partying Help Tourists in the hotel bar. He’d intended, after his jaunt with Regina, to get some sleep. Instead, some of the people he’d met with Lucky the previous night had glimpsed him by the elevators and dragged him over. Then he had been enticed with a special shot-glass version of the Winthrop Cocktail. Repeatedly enticed.

  He groaned. Twitched. He couldn’t tell if his latest encounter with the cleaning lady had actually happened, or if it had been sculpted from the rough clay of his sundry personality defects. The incident, real or imagined, started with the standard loud statement of intention by the cleaning lady. He did not answer—and then he heard a key in the door. But he could not move, from fear or alcohol poisoning. In his paralysis, he heard the door open—and then stall on the chain, which he had somehow remembered to hook before passing out. The door argued with the chain, once, twice, and then this sinister whisper slithered forth, chilling his soul: “I’m going to clean this room! Clean it up! Clean it up! Clean it allll up!” Then nothing. He woke up on the paranoid-hangover side of the bed, trembling faintly.

  Around noon the phone rang and he answered it, purely to test if he was capable of routine physical acts. Caught off guard in the midst of this experiment, the receiver smashed to his face, he agreed to meet Beverley at Admiral Java. It took him a few moments to realize that Beverley was the librarian. He looked for some unwrinkled clothes. Safe from the housekeeper’s influence, and under his slobbish tutelage, his room was magnificently dirty, in a state of happy and familiar slovenly disrepair. It had taken a few days, but he had successfully re-created some of the comforting sights from his life back home, with shirts dangling off chairs and doorknobs, and rumpled pants crawling across the floor. A proper nest. He rescued some promising artifacts and beat it downstairs.

  “I said I’d call you if I found anything, so here it is,” she said. She slid a cardboard box across the stainless steel counter. A red ribbon embraced the box, tight and vivid against the ancient cardboard. Outside on Winthrop Square, residents and Help Tourists strolled in the proud afternoon. The weather had cleared up for the barbecue. He didn’t put it past Lucky to bribe whole weather systems, swapping favors for stock.

  Beverley tapped the box. “Back in ’37,” she said earnestly, “George Winthrop commissioned Gertrude Sanders to write a history of the town.”

  He told her he had a copy of it already.

  “You don’t have this one,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Her first draft wasn’t ass-kissy enough, so they made her change a lot of it. The one they published was the happy-face version. I went through this,” she said, running a fingertip across the box, “when I was doing the research for Lucky. There’s some cool shit in it. Not a lot of juicy scandals, but the old bird really had a way with primary sources. I respect that.”

  His tongue felt two times too big for his mouth. He took a sip of coffee and knew the caffeine was going to render a harsh indictment to his system when it kicked in. Well, it was nice of her to go to all that trouble. He told her so.

  “You’re going to like it,” she assured him. “Remember when you asked why they put the law about naming on the books? I think it was for protection. It was the second law they made. You know what the first one was? That you need a majority on the city council to do anything. They thought it would always be the same way—the two of them on one side, and Winthrop on the other. They thought they could control him.”

  “We know how that worked out,” he said.

  Beverley’s lipstick, the barrette in her hair, were the same shade as the ribbon on the box. He imagined a whole store, a five-and-ten, that sold everything you might need in the exact same color: sheets, toothbrushes, pots and pans, lamps. The store cut up into a blue section, a yellow section, etc. The orderly and color-coded world. Then he realized he was thinking of Outfit Outlet gone amok.

  “Nice interview in the paper,” she said. “Didn’t know you were such a fan of Aberdeen.”

  “Shit.” He’d forgotten.

  “But then, who knew Jurgen was a reporter? When I worked at Aberdeen, he was this scrawny surfer guy who worked in the PR department. Always playing those first-person shooter tournaments after hours, when everybody went home.”

  Fighting instinct, he asked her, “What was it like?”

  “A press release for Lucky, but everything they run in that paper is like that. It’s a company town. That was the fifth time I’ve read that article—no offense—though each time there’s a new hook, or person they’re interviewing.” She tapped his arm. “You came off great. It made your job sound really interesting. Names are important,” she said, and for the hundredth time he was given a secondhand version of a public radio piece from last year, a behind-the-scenes look at the naming of a new kind of hubcap.

  Most people had first heard about his profession from that piece, which had been strong-armed into existence by the PR wing of Montgomery-Tilt, just after they started an in-house nomenclature department. There were two things that people remembered about the radio piece, months later. The first was the famous nomenclature shaggy-dog story about the car company that couldn’t figure out why their new luxury sedan wasn’t selling in this one particular foreign market. They finally figured out why: in the local patois, the name they’d given the vehicle was slang for—excrement! The story was standard dinner-table fodder for namers everywhere, laying out a central issue of their profession with rueful clarity, and it was a sad day for the entire industry when this anecdote was stolen from them. “It’s like Prometheus giving fire to the lowly humans!” as one of his colleagues put it.

  The second memorable item was the small bit at the end concerning the names of God. It stayed with people. In carefully modulated tones, the narrator discussed belief systems in which there were names so powerful that they could not be spoken aloud or written down. Pronouncing the true name of God, in certain precincts, would implode one’s mouth. Elsewhere, scribbling down the name of the Supreme Being would summon an earthquake the instant the last letter was formed. Or some other calamity in that vein. Such was the power of the true name of God. And G-d, too. In Some Cultures, if someone discovers your true name, it will kill you as quickly as if they had eaten your soul. There were colorful, popular legends about the secret names of demons and genies that, once known, bound them to the service of mortals. They would have to do your bidding, perform feats, grant your tawdry mortal wishes. Genies who adamantly refused to do windows would relent once you burned the proper incense and uttered the solemn syllables of their true names. “Names are very hallowed things,” Beverley said with gravity, hoping for a reaction.

  How were you supposed to get paid if you couldn’t even write down the name on an invoice? Sure, sure, harnessing the dynamic force of a name was central to his work. Freedom, New Prospera. Heck, Apex. People want to get in there, inhabit it, roll around like pigs in a good name. He said, “It’s a living,” and told her he had to get back to the hotel.

  “I’ll see you at the barbecue?” She pulled her sunglasses down an inch so he could see he
r eyes.

  “You’re going?”

  “Everybody’s going to the barbecue,” she informed him.

  Was loneliness a brand? Loyal customers, jumbo size, lifetime supply. He turned to leave and she called after him, “I’m going to need that back, you know.”

  He hoisted the manuscript into the air and bowed.

  . . . . . . . .

  Soon after he stubbed his toe, the nominations for that year’s Identity Awards came down. He was at his desk when Roger Tipple strolled over to his office to give him the good news. Tipple’s self-satisfied stride, his gathering smirk, the quality of light through the windows at that time of year—these things dominoed into déjà vu and he knew he’d been nominated in a category or two. The last few years, he’d been the man to beat.

  Tipple shook his hand across the desk and exclaimed, “You’ve done it again!” The nominations wouldn’t be announced officially for a few hours yet, but Tipple had the inside dope. That year he was up for Best ReImagining and Best Name for what he’d done with Apex, and the company as a whole was up for Best Identity Firm. It didn’t need to be said that this last nomination was due in no small part to his hard work on numerous company accounts. Nor did it need to be said that two subclauses in his contract had just kicked in, and come bonus time he’d be a happy man. Tipple pumped his hand again.

  He leaned back in his chair. To be recognized as the best in your field. What name do we give to that feeling?

  Apex.

  He worked at half speed the rest of the day, which meant he was still lapping his colleagues. Sometime after lunch he decided Loquacia fit the new anti-shyness drug. He’d just started seeing Bridget, and he called her to tell her the good news, but stopped short of inviting her to the awards ceremony, as it was four weeks away and he didn’t know if he would still be seeing her at that point. Occasionally he’d look up from his desk and catch someone looking at him from out there in the cubicle badlands—Tipple was making the rounds, spreading the word. An e-mail came down from on high, telling them to meet in the conference room at four o’clock. There wouldn’t be anyone left who didn’t know the good news at that point, but they’d sip champagne from the paper cups with well-manufactured gusto. At four o’clock he took a step toward the door of his office and stubbed his toe on the leg of his desk.

  The toe. The toe had been stubbed, and stubbed well. In the days following his accident he learned an astounding fact. Apparently the toe had been strangely magnetized by injury so that whenever there was something in the vicinity with stubbing polarity, his toe was immediately drawn to it. His toe found stub in all the wrong places, tables and chairs of course, but also against curbs, stools, against imperfections in the sidewalk that made him trip but left no visual evidence when he looked back, as passersby chortled. Even through the thickest shoes, excruciating vibrations harassed the sad little digit. He began to loathe low perpendiculars. When he stubbed his toe while stepping into the shower, a thin ribbon of blood snaked from beneath the Apex bandage for a few seconds and then disappeared into the drain. It was blood from an invisible wound. He decided his toe had developed an abuse pathology, and kept returning to the hurt as if one day it would place the pain in context, explain it. Give it a name.

  As a consequence, he was in some agony, and hadn’t noticed that he’d started to favor his other foot until he got to the conference room and Bart Grafton asked him, “What’s up with your foot, man?” Grafton told him he’d been limping for the last few days. He responded that it was nothing. A few minutes later, after Tipple delivered the news to the assembled, his co-workers cheered him, and he mustered a smile. The champagne fizzed in the paper cups. The paper cups were part of an enchanted supply that never ran out, replenishing itself underneath the kitchen counter between festive office gatherings.

  They were good times.

  . . . . . . . .

  When he got back to his room, he watched half a sitcom, beat off, took a shower, and removed the sarcophagus lid from the unabridged “A History of the Town of Winthrop.” Sounded more like a subtitle. Which begged the question.

  He didn’t know what he was after. This version lay differently on the page. There were more quotes from residents, excerpts from diaries, and newspaper stories. Assorted herbs and spices, but nothing besmirching the good name of the book’s benefactor. More of a redirecting of the spotlight. Only room for one on this dais. If the history of the town Winthrop became the chronicle of the family Winthrop, well, they were the ones forking over the dough. With historians and grocery clerks, the customer is always right.

  His flipping-around stalled when he came across a reference to the Light and the Dark, his favorite dynamic duo founding fathers. He shook his head once more at their crummy nicknames. The top of the paragraph revealed Miss Gertrude Sanders to be rooting through the private diary of one Abigail Goode, daughter of Goode the Elder, aka the Light. He loaned the young correspondent Regina’s face, picturing her in an olde-timey photograph, tinted in long-suffering sepia. Later, he read, she became the principal of the “colored school” in town. Another dutiful daughter in the clan. Abigail, Regina. Deep in that Goode DNA, a certain hardwired rectitude bided its time. He realized that he hadn’t met any descendants of Field. Had he traveled on any streets named for him or his descendants? He’d ask Regina later.

  Young Abigail was the main source for Gertrude’s descriptions of the migration from the South. The Goodes, the Fields, and twelve other families lighting out for the territories, 1867. In Abigail’s account, her father came off as the optimist-prophet type, quick on the draw with a pick-me-up from the Bible and a reminder of their rights as American citizens. Uncle Field turned out to be the downer-realist figure, handy with a “this stretch of the river is too treacherous to cross” and an “it is best that we not tarry here past sundown.” His perspective may have been overcast, but from the diary, it seemed that Field had a knack for being right. The Lost White Boy Incident was a good example.

  The actual story of the Lost White Boy Incident was very short, but it intersected with what must have been constant concerns for the settlers—where to bunk down, how much to interact with white communities—as well as one particular issue of singular vexation that was timeless, whether it was the 1860s or the 1960s: how to keep white folks from killing you.

  The pilgrims were near the end of their journey, a mere few days’ travel from Freedom. They set up camp for the night, having passed enough people on the road to know they were near a large settlement. Had it been earlier in the day, they would have sent one of their more “fair”-skinned companions, White Jimmy, to pick up supplies. (One of the group’s rules seemed to be: When in doubt, send the light-skinned guy.) Night, however, was quick on their heels. They decided against it. Then the Lost White Boy strolled into camp.

  He imagined a cherub out of an Apex commercial: scuffed up, out of sorts, offering up a tiny wound and a low, plaintive “I hurt.” The ensuing back-and-forth must have been very contentious. Where did he come from? they asked. What did he want? they asked. Do we have to adopt him? they wondered. How are we going to keep from being killed once white people find him here? Quite the head-scratcher. The little boy, Abigail wrote, was “mute as a spruce.” He blinked every once in a while, but it didn’t sound like the kid was giving up anything else. If he’d been there, his suggestion would have been to wait a while, and hope the Lost White Boy would wander off again. The sight of the occasional errant roach in his apartment engendered the same caliber of response.

  Abraham Goode and William Field were summoned from their no doubt caliph-worthy tents. Solomon time. Goode was of the mind that they had a moral duty as Christians and Americans to help him. A modern translation would be something along the lines of, “We shall return this child to the proper authorities.” In response, Field offered (again in the contemporary idiom), “I think we should point this kid toward the woods and tell his skinny little ass to keep walking,” being of the firm opinion tha
t no amount of explaining was going to keep the Man from bringing his foot down on their collective necks. And just to be safe, the best thing to do would be to pack up and put as much distance between them and him, ASAP.

  Now, the Light and the Dark probably commanded their own zones of influence in the camp. He recognized them as a common business pair: a marketing, vision guy teamed up with a bottom-line, numbers guy. You knew what to expect when you knocked on their doors. Upbeat spin on next year’s earnings outlook? Stop by Goode’s office on your way back from break. Wondering if you dare remodel the kitchen next spring? Field will be happy to warn you off, advise you to stick to Cancún for your next big splurge. The homesteaders, he reckoned, sided with Goode or Field depending on what kind of day they were having. Odds were, when the final numbers were tallied, Goode won more arguments than he lost, because he sided with optimism. You didn’t pack up all your shit and trek halfway across the country unless you had a strong optimistic streak. That was the Goode part of you. The Field part of you told you to make sure you brought your shotgun. Musket, whatever.

  The more he thought about it, still faintly hungover in his upstairs warren in the Hotel Winthrop, the more the Lost White Boy Incident resonated. These homesteaders had escaped servitude and violence and resolved to put it all behind them. Left that misery at their backs to start their new black town, with their own rules. Whites had their names for what they cherished; these explorers, in their new home, would put their own names to things. Way he saw it, the Lost White Boy, in his slack-jawed, speechless mystery, tapped into this key moment where they had to decide if they were going to continue to deal with the white world, or say: You go your way and we’ll go ours. Decide what exactly was the shape and character of the freedom they had been given.