Bodies Electric

by Colin Harrison

  “The cable line?”

  “Sure.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, I stick it into the house.”

  “How’s business?”

  He shrugged. “I’m busy enough, I get a couple of jobs a day usually, but we’re gonna be bought up by the Koreans.”

  “Wow,” I said vaguely. “I didn’t know that.”

  “The whole fucking thing.” Hector spat out the window in disgust. “Koreans. We got guys in the union who know everything that’s going on. They seen all the key documents, tell us what’s goin’ down, you know what I mean? I think it’s North Koreans or something. Guys goin’ buy up the whole damn fucking thing. I’d like to see them guys try to wire a fucking apartment building, crawl around like a goddamned monkey all day. People try to steal your tools and shit. It ain’t right.”

  I murmured my agreement, my eyes on his hands. I wondered how he could have hit Dolores’s pretty face, and at the thought of this my mood hardened.

  “You want the car?” Hector asked.

  I paused, as if to consider the question. “Probably not.”

  “But we drove around.”

  “And I’m pretty sure I don’t want it.”

  “But it rides smooth. Engine’s good.”

  “I don’t want it.”

  “Why the fuck you been wastin’ my time then?”

  I looked at him. What a bastard I was, really. “I didn’t see too many other customers on your lot.”

  “Yeah, because it was raining and nobody buys cars when it’s fucking raining, you asshole. Why the fuck you wasting my time? Shit.” Hector crossed his arms. “I shoulda seen you was just lookin’ for a joy ride.”

  “No,” I said, figuring a way to finesse my way out. “I’m looking for a car. I like the salesman, but I just don’t like the car.”

  There was an uneasy silence.

  “Really,” I said.

  “I missed like two fucking innings of the game, so don’t give me this kinda shit.” Hector looked straight out the front of the car. “I don’t need the aggravation, I got pressures, the wife and all.”

  I pulled the car back into the lot. Then I asked, “You don’t mind me mentioning it, but what happened to your throat there?”

  Hector’s hand touched the bandage. “Ahh, shit, I got attacked by a dog.”

  I handed him the car keys. “Bite your throat?”

  “Yeah.” We got out of the car. “But not for long. Dogs useta scare the shit outa me, but not anymore. Hate the big ones, the shepherds. Motherfuckers. Tell you the truth, if it paid well enough, I’d kill ’em for a livin’.”

  That was all I needed to hear. Hector was angry and dangerous, and I was going to have to be careful about him. After you have seen your wife gunned down, you understand the unpredictability of violence. And it makes you tense. So that same Sunday evening, intending to unwind and think about the coming week at work, I said good night to Dolores and Maria and retreated to my roof with a glass, ice, and bottles of gin and tonic water. Drinking is very bad for my condition; as my doctor said, it loosens up that sphincter at the base of the esophagus and all manner of pain bubbles up. But fuck it, I figured, I needed to relax. The sun had fallen away at the west, and around me was the sprawling mass of Brooklyn, including Hector to the south of me, wondering where his wife and daughter were. I drank that in as heavily as I tossed back the booze I had carried up to the roof. Have I said yet that Brooklyn is a great and romantic place? Its simultaneous multiplicity catches in the brain, it is a streaming, strange place. Its history is generally unknown to the immigrants who arrive each generation, who come to the church spires and endless blocks of row homes, the places named after the dead, the names themselves Anglicized versions of the words used by the Dutch settlers who seized that green heel of land where the Hudson meets the Atlantic, where Canarsee Indians, a branch of the Coastal Algonquins, lived in the lost manner, century upon century, and where later the British drove ashore forcing George Washington to retreat into the fog of the East River upon a low wooden ferry. Where my famous ancestor stood on the shore while the wind whipped his unruly beard and hair while he sang his elegiac, celebratory song of America and buttfucked young sailors above the saloons. Where thousands of Italian boys fresh from Ellis Island learned how to sling a neat bed of mortar onto a row of bricks using a pointed trowel. Block upon block of brick buildings squatting in the lengthening metallic haze, long carpets of sunlight gliding across the streets, cars stopping and streaming like cells of blood through a great and thickened heart, the trees always dying, some of them old plane trees brought over from London that spread their wrinkled bark over the sidewalks like melted wax, while children played nearby, still only children, watched solemnly by the old women, their bellies long fat, hips ruined. And forty feet underground sits the token clerk, setting found items behind the booth window for the public to claim: a school pass, a set of keys, a cheap engagement ring. The clerk nods at a young transit cop who superstitiously keeps a laminated picture of his sweetheart taped to the inside of his policeman’s cap. I’ve seen that, and the two dozen black men slapping drums and shaking gourds on the Jamaican coast of Prospect Park, a pounding circle of rhythm surrounded by several hundred onlookers and a few dozen fevered dancers in the surging whirlpool of sound, with fried chicken in tinfoil sold from coolers on the side. In Brooklyn, no one apologizes for their desires. I’ve seen the line of people waiting outside the car with the newly hijacked cellular phone, ten bucks for ten minutes, anywhere in the world. And the hulking box of the nursing home in Fort Greene, where old Chinese women with little remaining hair blink in the sunlight, bottles rigged above their wheelchairs dripping into their arms, catheter bags filling with yellow from below. I have seen all of these things at some point, I know these things even if I do not remember them: the wheezing personal injury lawyer painting the horrors of the car accident to the jury in the civil court downtown, and the Salvadoran refugee of dubious legal status, his mind stuffed with horrors (the dismemberment of his brother, the shallow grave), silently stripping layers of lead paint from the fine Victorian wooden moldings in the house of a Brooklyn Heights decamillionaire, the refugee alone and wanting the aloneness, no radio even, content in a room of fumes; and the mugger watching his victim paw through her handbag for her keys in the apartment house foyer, watching her, waiting for the voice to tell him to pull his knife and go; and the retired bus driver setting up his little canasta table on his nineteenth-floor terrace facing the ocean in Bay Ridge, his union pension secure, a man who once saw Brooklyn’s own Jackie Gleason getting out of a white Cadillac convertible and still talks about it, who turns on the television and then, giving a low surprised cough, drops dead, the cards slipping from his hands and fluttering off the terrace, red-white, red-white . . .

  All of it, the heavy soul of Brooklyn: the priest shaving carefully before the first Sunday mass, forgiving himself for masturbating (and with such guiltless abandon); and in the diabetes ward of the hospital, a roomful of overweight black women in their sixties, lying in their beds and cackling, gossiping, waiting on the Lord, awaiting their various amputations below the knee; and the Korean shopkeeper showing the new relative how to shrug when the customer claims he’s been shortchanged a dime; and the Mexican man trimming cut flowers each day outside that same shop, remembering his mother living in Mexico City above the bakery; and the advertising space saleswoman swimming laps at 5:00 A.M. in the club pool, reciting in silent fervor the twenty-minute pitch to get the Japanese car account. And the Bangladeshi man squatting against the brickwork in the sun, remembering the dung patties slapped up to dry on the wall of his family home in the hard sun of the Indian subcontinent; and the middle manager at Chase Manhattan noticing the slight bit of blood in his stool and then forgetting it again along with the day’s headlines as he walks his son to second grade at St. Ann’s. And a judge in the courthouse in downtown Brooklyn watching a fly taste the corner of an eight-hundred-page
complaint that alleges that the mob runs the window-cleaning union in the city, thinking to himself that wisdom and personal corruption may often go together in a man; and a fellow dancing in drunken terror and joy on the roof of his Park Slope brownstone, while below him, beneath three sets of hundred-year-old joists and oak floor boards, a dark-haired woman with a fierce and beautiful face is wondering why she is living now in the house of a stranger and thinking of her husband, who, she knows, still loves her in ways he cannot understand, each day drilling the hole through which the cheap electronic entertainments will flow, wondering where his wife is, wishing that some Sunday he could sell a car or two to the deadbeats and assholes who come onto the lot, feeling that time is running against him—as it ran against all of us, he, we, us, Dolores, Maria, Hector, and me, living flecks of the heavy hard soul of Brooklyn.

  I woke up at about 4:00 A.M. on my roof, shivering and stiff and sick, the empty bottle and glass rolled into the gutter, and I descended the roof ladder slowly. The pressure is getting to you, I thought, you’re drinking too much and acting weird. I knocked back a quarter of a bottle of Mylanta and slept a few hours, then Maria came up to my bedroom to watch “Sesame Street” while I turned myself into a man in a suit, which is how I understand myself. Later, I got up from the breakfast table to leave for work and said to Dolores, as I used to say to Liz, “I’ll be home around nine o’clock.”

  Dolores was brushing out Maria’s hair. “Okay.”

  “Just so that you know, that’s all.”

  “Need anything?” she said, meaning at the store.

  “No. Yes. Do you mind if we had some hot cereal one of these mornings?”

  “You want some?” she asked.

  “I do, actually. It’s what I grew up eating.”

  Maria handed her mother each small plastic barrette as it was needed. I realized that she had worn the same pants the day before. Dolores would be taking Maria to the park and it occurred to me that all the kids there would be wearing bright, expensive stuff from the better stores.

  “Do you have enough clothes for her?” I inquired of Dolores.

  “I’ve got that new stuff but I have to wash out things usually.”

  “I’d like to get Maria some clothes,” I said. “The whole set.”

  “She could use some socks and—”

  “No, I mean the whole deal. Socks, shoes, little dresses and tights, whatever little girls wear. Ten dresses, ten of everything. I want you to go to Macy’s in Manhattan—”

  “Macy’s will cost too much, Jack.” Dolores frowned.

  “How much?”

  “That’a a lot of money for these things, especially shoes. Kid’s shoes are expensive.”

  “Spend it,” I told her. “Go get every damn thing she needs. And make sure you buy decent clothes, not some cut-rate crap. Go buy Maria the best stuff.” I pulled out my wallet. “Here’s my card.”

  “They won’t take it.” Dolores shook her head. “I’m not your wife or anything—”

  “Take this one then.” I handed her my American Express Gold Card. “They won’t ask any questions. It’s considered an insult to the customer.”

  She took the card and looked at it. “I can’t do this.”

  “Why not?”

  Dolores looked at me.

  “I just want to take care of Maria, Dolores.”

  “It’s a lot of money.”

  “It’s just money. I have plenty of money. Maria needs clothes. I’d like for her to have them. It would give me pleasure.”

  “So maybe I could buy a few things?” Dolores ventured. “You know, just get some things I need—”

  “For yourself? Get it. Get it all. Go on a shopping trip. Take a taxi home. I mean it. Have fun.”

  “The bill will be too high,” she protested. “Really. It’ll be too high, Jack.”

  That very morning, that absolute moment, I had something more than $79,400 in my money market account. But I didn’t tell her this.

  “Shouldn’t Maria be going to some kind of school now, some sort of kindergarten?” I went on. “There are plenty of these little programs in the neighborhood.”

  “She could, maybe a couple of days a week, to learn the socializing and reading, you know. But that costs money, too.”

  “Why don’t you sign her up for one?” I said. “There must be half a dozen in the neighborhood. Just find one you like and we’ll get started.”

  Dolores stared at me and then looked away.

  I ventured a hand onto her shoulder so that she would face me. She didn’t move it. “You don’t understand, Dolores. The money is not a problem. The bill can’t be too high.”

  “Why? Why do you say that?” she said, her brow confused.

  I thought then of Liz in the morgue at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, her flesh gray and cold and firm. And I thought of her killer, Roynell Wilkes, the crisp hundreds stuck into his mouth. “Why, Dolores?” I said, opening the front door to go. “Because the bill was paid a long time ago.”

  Later, in my office, I remembered Hector’s words—Dogs useta scare the shit outa me, but not anymore. If it paid well enough, I’d kill ’em for a livin’—and requested that Helen call the division vice president of Big Apple Cable, a fifty-year-old smiler named Harry Janklow whom I’d met at the annual stockholders’ meeting, a rigged carnival game if there ever was one. Janklow knew now that he would never rise any higher and when we met that first time, he’d inspected me for some ingredient that he lacked. On the phone I explained to him that I wanted the personnel file of one of his employees, Hector Salcines, sent to me. He wanted to know why, of course.

  “It’s a stupid reason,” I complained. “We have these consultants who are testing how well we move information around, not just the important information but the other stuff. They say we’re too bureaucratic and want to start chopping out departments. Morrison told them they could get any information about the company within twenty-four hours.”

  “He said that? That’s total bullshit.”

  “Yes, but he said it. In our meeting last week.” I knew that Janklow would have no idea of what was happening on the thirty-ninth floor other than what he read in the business pages each morning and heard through the grapevine, distorted and twentieth-hand. He was too low.

  “What were some of the other things?” he asked.

  “Stupid stuff. Like total recording division receipts for the Southern California market last Friday.”

  “It’s impossible to get that sort of personnel info fast.”

  I heard the hesitation in Janklow’s voice, his worry that agreeing to do such a strange thing violated protocol. He didn’t care about Hector Salcines, of course; he just didn’t want to get in trouble. So I set the hook further: “Also,” I added, “it’s not just you guys. It’s offices throughout the whole operation. Morrison wants a report from me how fast the info is available. He thinks he can identify the weak divisions, informationally weak, I mean, and the strong ones.”

  “I see,” Janklow said, happy to be informed. “What was it he wanted?”

  “They picked a name at random from the master employee list, a big printout. The guy just opened it like it was a phone book and picked—let me see the name again—here it is, Hector Salcines.”

  “How fast do you guys need it?”

  “Tomorrow morning.”

  “Won’t be a problem. I’ll have my secretary messenger it over.”

  “Right.”

  “Anything particular? Part of the file?”

  “No, just the whole thing. The job application form, whatever else is on there, this Salcines guy’s file.”

  “Consider it done.”

  I did. Like most people, he needed to please his bosses.

  At eight o’clock I walked to the other side of the floor and there was Mrs. Marsh, watering the plant on her desk.

  “I’d like a few minutes with the Chairman,” I said.

  “He’s not available, I’m afraid,” s
he said sweetly, as if she did not remember our conversation from the previous Friday. “He has an appointment.”

  I looked at her.

  “C’ mon.”

  “He’s in a meeting.”

  I didn’t want to be unpleasant this time. “I know exactly who he is in a meeting with and so I know that I can see him.”

  Mrs. Marsh raised an eyebrow. “I doubt that.”

  “He’s getting his shoes shined.”

  Mrs. Marsh’s mouth fell open into a little red oval and I took the opportunity to walk past her into the Chairman’s office and there he was, reading the same bound volume by Trollope, having his shoes shined by Robinson.

  “Good morning,” I said. “I’d like a few minutes.”

  The Chairman turned his head.

  “Very good!” he exclaimed, as if he had thought of the idea himself. “Let’s talk. About what? Anything you like. I don’t know how you got past Mrs. Marsh, she must think very highly of you.”

  Robinson stood up, done, and nodded.

  “Thanks, Freddie.”

  Robinson must have remembered our conversation the previous Friday. He did not look at me and left.

  “Now then,” the Chairman started.

  Mrs. Marsh stepped into the office in her sensible shoes and, glancing at me with candied politeness, set some papers before the Chairman. “This is the lawyer’s agreement,” she indicated with a sibilant whisper, “three places to sign . . . good . . . and . . . the letter to that Professor Zacks . . .”

  “The historian?”

  “Yes.”

  “We donated the books he requested?”

  “Yes.”

  The Chairman looked up at me. “Remarkable fellow. I bought a rare book in London twenty years ago, an account of the habits of Parisian courtesans in the eighteenth century, and he tracked me down.”

  “This is the letter saying no to Mr. Hitt,” Mrs. Marsh continued in a hush. She stood close to him in her bleached blouse, smelling of soap.