Bodies Electric

by Colin Harrison

  “I heard you were fired and I got the number from that old bitch and thought, I’ll call and see what happens. Okay? I didn’t know if your husband was going to be here or what, you know, maybe beat the crap out of me.”

  Her lips curled suggestively. “You’re not looking for a little easy something?”

  “If I were, then you would tell me to go to hell and that would be the end of it, right?”

  “Oh sure.”

  “So it’s a deal?” I pressed her.

  Dolores said nothing. But she shrugged, and I took this to be a yes.

  On the way out of the hotel, I rapped on old man Clammers’s window.

  “She’s going to have to be here a few minutes after five o’clock,” I told him. “Got that?”

  He ignored me and continued to finger his racing form.

  “She’s going to get a call upstairs,” I continued. “She’s paid up now, so I don’t want you to kick her out or anything before she gets my call about five o’clock.”

  He shook his head. “Spare yourself the trouble, fellah.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean it always turns out exactly how you didn’t expect it.” His old eyes contemplated my face. “You’re lookin’ for this and you get that. Ain’t worth it. I seen too many cases.”

  Ahmed Nejad was going to help me but he didn’t know it yet. We’d both played on the Columbia soccer team, traveling around the Ivy League, to the University of Pennsylvania to play in Franklin Field, to Harvard’s field, to Yale to play in the Yale Bowl. Ahmed’s family escaped Iran not long after the Shah fell, and they’d reorganized their clan and millions of dollars in New York. The family were all moderate, internationalized Muslims, and had foreseen that theriseof the Ayatollah Khomeini would be bad for a family that did business in the West. Ahmed was a fiery player and temperamentally suited only for the striker position, which requires one to cut through defenses and deliver the ball into the goal. Ahmed’s play depended on a skilled recklessness and an almost cutthroat desire to get past the obstruction of players on the other team. His thick, hairy legs threshed and damaged those of opponents. Ivy League decorum meant nothing to him and his one great weakness was a violent temper; invariably three-quarters into the game, Ahmed would receive a yellow card for his tantrums. On the ride to New Haven or Cambridge or Philadelphia he would play poker with those who were stupid enough to challenge him. No one sufficiently understood the nuance of his accent to know when he was lying. And since then, he had done quite well—the city’s ever-shifting patterns of commerce were the opponent he played against now. In college, we had both snared an interest in restoring old houses, but he had decided to do it for a living. He renovated buildings with the forcible intention of a man planning to score well when reselling, even into a bottomed-out real estate market. At the present, I knew, he was at work on a six-story brick manufacturing building a block west of Broadway in Soho. Ahmed had big plans to turn the abandoned, soot-stained edifice into a modern urban confection, with an exterior color scheme and bright new offices on the top five floors, trendy shops and galleries below. The plans included a penthouse apartment on the top floor, which I knew was nearly complete. This is where I hoped Dolores and Maria could stay temporarily.

  But the only way to contact Ahmed was to find him at the site, so I hopped a cab and directed the driver downtown toward Ahmed’s building. We pulled up in front of a huge freight doorway, from which blew a gritty dust that spiraled upward in the air. Workers wheeled refrigerator-sized waste canisters out of the building, each bin stuffed with wood and iron and plaster and cement. They emerged dusty and blinking from the deep gloom of the building, within which hung long strings of work lamps, much like the entrance to a mine. I found Ahmed, who, as usual, was dressed in a close-fitting European suit. He stood with a small wizened Pakistani or Indian man around the other side of the building. They were peering at half a dozen Mexican men who dangled from scaffolding about sixty feet up. Ahmed and the man conferred and then the man hollered a warped, Pakistani version of Spanish to the Mexican men, one of whom drawled a response with an explanatory bobbing of the head, whereupon the man on the ground translated to Ahmed, who responded in Farsi. Then the man hollered in a clipped musical British accent to a two-man crew from Bangladesh who, I saw, were higher up, closer to the roof, waiting for instructions—their perfectly black hair shining in the sun, their shy voices echoing down the wall. They were working the facade of the building, sandblasting the sooted brickwork to a fresh and prosperous rose. Ahmed saw me then.

  “My friend!” He walked over and held out his hand.

  “Ahmed,” I said. Then I pointed to his companion. “A translator?”

  “Sanjay is my foreman. He knows six languages, not including the Romance languages. He is the most brilliant man I have ever employed.” Ahmed waved back at Sanjay, who continued to relay instructions between the two crews.

  “And you pay him very well?”

  Ahmed turned back to me. “He thinks so, yes.”

  “You only hire people off the boat?”

  Ahmed frowned. “These men are the only men who know how to work. They don’t want health insurance. Or the pension plan—they don’t expect it. All they want is work and the cash I pay for it.” As he spoke a fine silt of brick dust floated down on us. Inside the building we could hear the shrill pitch of grinders and drills. “And, Jack, that is true of you. All you know how to do is work.” He grinned wickedly. “You work—but I make money.” His smile showed his teeth, which he knew were very fine. “And now you want something from me, am I right? Americans only come to Iranians when something is wanted.”

  I described the favor I was requesting of him as we walked around to the entrance of the building, explaining that it was only for a little while and that Dolores and Maria absolutely had no other place to stay.

  “This woman and her daughter, they are without any money, yes?” Ahmed asked. “They are not going to pay me?”

  I nodded.

  “What are they doing?”

  “Trying to get away, trying to change their lives,” I said.

  “But this is not the place to do that.”

  “Didn’t your family come here trying to change their fives?” I asked. “And what about these guys?” I gestured toward his workers.

  “I assume that she is very attractive.” Ahmed smiled his fine teeth. “This is not in doubt.”

  He looked directly at me then, having hassled me enough to be sure that I didn’t take him for granted. But it wasn’t that simple, either; what neither of us had mentioned was that I had found a job in our movie division’s Hollywood studio office for his cousin, the one member of Ahmed’s far-flung and talented family who was most assimilated into American culture. Her desire to give good phone for a third-tier studio executive was perceived as a betrayal by the family, Ahmed had told me, and the young woman seemed to have become a generic American, happily shorn of her Iranian heritage. But that was a family matter; what was important between us was that he had come to me and I had delivered, which he was obligated now to do. “I don’t have a lot of lights up there yet, but there is electricity,” Ahmed said. “She’s got hot water but there’s no washing machine or dishwasher hooked up.”

  “That’s okay,” I assured him. “She just needs to stay for a week, two at most.”

  “That is all? You are sure?”

  I was not sure, but I nodded anyway. We crossed the street to an old-time restaurant that had pictures of the boxing greats going back seventy years, and sat up at the long bar. Muhammad Ali, back when he was Cassius Clay, stood over us, fist cocked, fierce and sweaty and magnificent.

  “You have a big house,” Ahmed remarked. “Why doesn’t she stay with you?”

  “She won’t do that.”

  “She is very choosy for a woman who has nowhere to go.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “But we don’t have the kind of relationship where I could just invite her
to stay. Some guy, a boyfriend or husband or somebody, is after her and—”

  “Please my friend, no more.” Ahmed waved both palms in the air, unwilling to hear about such sordid affairs. “Just so long as she pays for any calls she makes and is out in ten days. I have got painters and finish carpenters coming.”

  “You have a phone up there?”

  “Sure.” Ahmed found a pack of French cigarettes in his breast pocket. “We put it in last week.”

  I took down the phone number. “Any furniture?”

  “There’s some chairs and a bed, but no stove. There is a refrigerator. We cannot yet burn oil down in the power plant,” Ahmed went on. “But we have some electric space heaters for the men who do fine handiwork. I will see that two heaters are put in the apartment in case the nights get cold.”

  “That’s great, Ahmed, really.”

  “Once she comes in, she can’t leave until six o’clock in the morning. That’s when the canine service comes for the dogs.”

  “Dogs?”

  “I have got two dogs that stay on the inside. A German shepherd and a rottweiler.” Ahmed looked at me. “Every morning we find a homeless person and cut him up and feed him to the dogs, who are very hungry by then.” He laughed menacingly. “Okay, not funny to you. We have got about a half a million dollars in equipment and tools and completed work in there. This morning I had an elevator circuit panel delivered. That was seventeen thousand dollars. These things cost a lot of money. So she is going to have to go by my rules.”

  I nodded. “That’s only fair.”

  “And there is a guard whom we have hired to stay around outside. She will not bother him.”

  “Right.”

  He stood from the bar, ready to leave. “I’ll have Sanjay get the place ready.”

  “Thanks, Ahmed,” I said.

  “I trust she is worth all of this trouble.”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “Are you trying to get her for yourself?”

  “I don’t know,” I told him. And that was the truth.

  I called Dolores at five o’clock. She picked up the phone after one ring. I explained what the place was like and Ahmed’s conditions for her staying there.

  “This is a free place?” Her voice was guarded again. “Totally free?”

  “Yes.”

  “Uh, you’re not paying my rent for me by any chance?”

  “No.”

  “It’s a favor from the guy who owns the place?”

  “Right.”

  “What does he want?”

  “Nothing. He owes me a favor.”

  “And nobody else lives there?” she asked suspiciously.

  “Nobody.”

  “That’s sort of weird.”

  “I agree.”

  “It’s safe, though,” she said. “Right?”

  “Nobody knows that anybody could live there, right now.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “In Brooklyn.”

  “Where?”

  “In Park Slope.”

  “Where the rich people live.”

  “A lot of different kinds of people live there.”

  “Me and Maria would be the only ones in the building?”

  “The only ones.”

  “Will you have keys to the building?”

  “No.”

  It went like this for a few more minutes, which seemed reasonable to me, since Dolores had to think of Maria and was trusting herself not just to me but to other strangers as well. But she agreed to come, finally, and I gave her the address. Then I called Helen. Mrs. Marsh had confirmed Monday’s schedule in Washington with the Chairman. I started to read the thick file Helen had given me. It was more technical than I realized, dense with detail. I’d have to memorize as much of it as possible. The bartender came over wiping a glass and I ordered two complete steak dinners, packed and boxed.

  When the taxi pulled up, Dolores got out with Maria and one very large suitcase. I paid the fare. Sanjay, who seemed to suffer from sore feet, hobbled over and dragged the suitcase toward the building as the cab pulled away.

  Maria pointed. “The man’s taking it, Mommy.”

  “It’s okay.” Dolores bent down and checked that Maria’s coat was done up near her neck. “He’s taking it to our room.” She pulled a tissue from her purse and put it to Maria’s nose. “Blow.”

  “No!”

  Dolores pressed the tissue into Maria’s face and the girl obeyed. Dolores looked at me. The afternoon sun was in her face and brought out the richness of her coloring, the light dazzling the dark mass of unruly long hair and brightening her eyes. I handed her the warm boxed dinners.

  “You didn’t have to do this for us.” Her fingers grazed the sleeve of my suit, ever so lightly. “Thank you.”

  Sanjay came back and nodded deferentially toward me.

  “We are ready, sir.”

  “There’s a phone up there,” I said before leaving. “I’d like to call you, all right?”

  “Sure,” Dolores replied with ever so slight a smile—a smile that understood that my casualness was hardly casual. Then she and Maria disappeared through the dusty haze into the gloom of Ahmed’s building, and I felt a sort of cheap, cunning satisfaction.

  I sawed away at the thick file for a few hours that night, knowing that I was responsible for everything in it, every small ridiculous fact, such as the transponder wattage of one of the Corporation’s satellites. Men like the Chairman no longer read anything closely, for they expect to have younger men know the answers to the little questions. Then I climbed up onto my roof in Park Slope with the portable phone in one hand and Dolores’s number in the other. I dialed, waited. The fine was busy. The wind whispered maple blossoms across the roof and far away rose the blue and red lights of the Empire State Building. In the faded pink beach chair, I wondered why I felt so drawn to Dolores Salcines when I’d been acculturated in childhood and adolescence to meet and know a particular kind of girl and then a particular kind of woman. They wore Shetland wool sweaters and had been bright students. They had gone to one of the twenty or thirty name-brand colleges or universities in this country. They were good girls, or if they had not been good, exactly, then they had never been bad. Maybe they had shoplifted a few times as teenagers, maybe they had slept around or done speed. Redial: busy. They had always been destined for a life of marriage and career and children. You could draw a line through the points of these women’s lives: they had been to Europe, they were dependable, they were up-to-date, they had too many shoes in their closets, they took vitamins, they could have plenty of orgasms, they didn’t watch much television usually, they liked to read, they were attractive, they knew a lot about coffees. They were white. I loved these women, many of them. My mother was one, in the way of her generation, and Liz had most certainly been one. Dolores Salcines was not.

  Sirens sprinted down one of the nearby avenues, echoed by and interspersed with other sirens, now near, now wailing far, conveying always in the night an unending urgency in all corners of the city. Only rarely do we cross over to the other side of ourselves, to the other side of possibility. I hit the redial on the phone again. I let it ring twenty times before I hung up. Dolores should not have been out, but she was out.

  FOUR

  LIKE A GREAT OMINOUS INSECT, ONE OF THE CORPORAtion’s shiny black cars glided through the gloom and up my block the next Monday morning. It waited there, red parking lights bright. Inside, briefcase on my knees, I continued to cram the file into my head: now I was learning about satellite uplink frequencies and transmission footprints. The car threaded through Brooklyn toward LaGuardia Airport, past the little black boys selling roses and air-fresheners and hernia belts at the intersections. A pack of ten-year-olds sucking car exhaust all day long. I’ve seen the same thing in the Zona Rosa in Mexico City and near the Grand Eastern Hotel in Calcutta. At the red light they pressed their faces excitedly against the dark glass of the car, hoping to see a celebrity. The driver slid
down his window three inches and said something brutal to them. Their faces were already marked by struggle and privation. You see the doom of their predicament. I looked and then I looked away.

  On the shuttle I chewed antacids and kept reading about satellites. Called Helen from the plane and went over a few things. There was no message from Dolores, so I dialed her number directly. One of Ahmed’s workmen answered and said Dolores was out. I hoped that she was looking for a job, I hoped she wasn’t looking for trouble. I glanced at the newspaper. Then I gazed out the plane’s window and tested myself to see if I remembered Liz’s face. Yes.

  Before landing, I checked my smile in the restroom, grimacing close to the mirror to see if any stray bits of breakfast clung to my teeth, had become jammed up high where the gumline was receding. These things matter. People make decisions about you. People are happily vicious. We once decided not to hire an assistant vice president of information systems because he wasn’t in control of his saliva. Very smart guy, every credential in the world, well spoken of, nice silk tie, every possible business connection, but an excess of spitty shine on his bottom lip. It bothered a few too many people, Samantha especially. I opened my mouth wider in front of the mirror and stared into my throat. A chronic acid condition in the esophagus can cause “abnormal” cells. My internist told me this when insisting that I cut back on the coffee and drinking, both of which relax the sphincter at the base of the esophagus and let the contents of the stomach rise upward into it. He was urging me to change my lifestyle, reduce the stress. What does abnormal mean? I asked. Precancerous, he answered. We do an endoscopy, get some cells to look at. I could move you up to metaclorepropamide or omeprazole, he went on, but that’s not a first-line therapy; there are serious side effects. And if it gets worse? I asked anxiously. You might develop what’s called “Barrett’s esophagus,” he answered, which means that the lining of the esophagus is becoming similar to the lining of the stomach. Generally we then have to do a surgical procedure called “Nissen’s plication.” A specialist makes an incision in your stomach. Then he sews part of the stomach around the base of the esophagus to tighten it up. That doesn’t sound very nice, I said. No, he answered, it’s not.