Quotients

by Tracy O'Neill

  “Come closer,” Alexandra said. And that translated too.

  On weekends, he spent hours in the consult of texts. He made lists. He loved to walk to the store with his list and see below his her handwriting—crème fraiche, strawberry cake. He went to the butcher. He’d salt. Tenderize. While she read in the other room, he followed the procedures step-by-step. And when there were specks of herb on his forehead, she took to leaning in the doorway, one hand over her eyes, asking, so hopeful, so apple-bright, “Still gruesome in there?” until dinner was ready. After, they played poker, and she did not let him win unless she’d had a wretched week at work. She rarely had a wretched week at work. In this way, he managed to give her many chocolates.

  One day, he tucked a note for her in a magazine: What does it feel like to make someone happy?

  Don’t play stupid, she wrote in a cookbook. You know.

  Chapter 3

  Alexandra Chen had once told Lyle Michaels anyone fortunate enough to have an irritating father was fortunate enough to have a father. It was just the sort of tautological thing she’d say. Besides, after the CUNY journalism panel, he was not ready for Frank.

  He was hanging around a municipal trash can, smoking cigarettes. Bri Freeman had just arrived, and he was narrating the blow-by-blow. The editor of the Trib had looked right at him as he said “blogs” profited on repackaging real journalists’ original reporting. Looked right at him as he said Lyle’s employer, Noze, acted as a platform for unverified information—and what happens when you become an open microphone for the craziest thing a crazy person will do or say? What happens to our politics? He was telling Bri Freeman all that when he saw his father approach but didn’t let on until it was precisely necessary, not until Frank raised his arms, here I am, a lumbering rectangle in plaid.

  “Hello,” Frank said. “Come stai, baby?” Frank said.

  Lyle exhaled. “Dad, this is Bri Freeman.”

  Hand out, half bow. “And you’re a website writer too?”

  “From the program, Dad,” he said. “Which is to say, contrary to popular belief in the Michaels household, other people also choose to spend a lot of time at half-filled seminar tables.”

  “Which is to say listen to this one announce his intellectual affiliations. Naturally, even Lyle’s affiliations were disaffiliations. He criticized the consensus view no matter what the consensus view was.”

  Frank squinted. “You drop out like my son too?”

  They had not spoken since his father told him he didn’t know a single person with a baby on the way out of an annulled marriage, not one who wouldn’t try to make it work with someone one in a million like Ingrid. Lyle did not know why Frank had come, but here he was acting the status quo. Lyle grabbed the strap of a bag from Bri’s shoulder, arcing it over his head so that it rested diagonally across his own torso.

  “Oh no, Bri abandoned me,” he said. “For Los Angeles and the tenure track.”

  “It wasn’t me,” Bri said. “It was al-Qaeda. The departments have money for the Middle East suddenly. I can’t complain.”

  “Just teach the future military advisors. Make the neoliberal case for the humanities.”

  “I missed you too, Ly,” she said.

  Lyle raised his eyebrows at Frank. “Missed me so much she missed the whole damn panel.”

  Her fingernail polish was chipped, and there was an ugly watch on her wrist, and it suited her. That way she had of drawing one shoulder to her chin, nonplussed, untouchable. He hadn’t seen her in over a year. “My flight was delayed.”

  “I think Lyle beat him,” Frank said.

  “It wasn’t a debate, Dad. Nobody wins.”

  “But you still beat him,” Frank said.

  “All right, Dad.” Lyle pinched the skin between his eyebrows.

  By stance, Lyle knew into his father’s mind. He could see his father shifting feet, the way he did when he refused to take painkillers for his back. For years, his mother had been hectoring Frank that the hours had to stop, and Frank, insisting on referring to the family not as the Michaelses but as the Micellis, told her the Micellis had always worked. Lyle had given up on that argument years ago. He turned back to Bri again.

  “So what I was saying was, I told him at Noze we are not buying Walter Lippmann–style snobbery. I said the implicit value is citizen report. I said our ethos is it is as much news as all the print journalism dispelled by the Iraq War, by Judith Miller and her imaginary WMDs.”

  “Very Arendt,” Bri said. “‘If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer.’”

  “‘And with such a people,’” Lyle continued, “‘you can then do what you please.’”

  Frank cleared his throat. “You know, I speak a little Spanish myself.”

  “What are you talking about, Dad? Where’s Mom?”

  “Buying ibuprofen. Her headaches, you know.”

  “The Joan Didion of Bayside, my mother,” Lyle said, adding, “minus the writing, minus the California and the Vogue.”

  “A smoker with migraines.”

  “And minus the cigarettes.”

  The paper program from the event was still in Frank’s hand, rolled up. He smacked it against his thigh, a signal to go, but Lyle did not acknowledge it. In his peripheral, Frank shifted his weight from foot to foot.

  “You look at the internet and here is an opportunity to make information free to everyone except the advertisers. That’s something academics’ve never understood. They always think the higher the markup, the more knowledge means.”

  Bri snapped open her lighter, another cigarette tucked into a weird miniaturized smile. “You ever miss it?”

  “So I can spend years writing the conference papers, the journal articles, and who will read them: eight and a half people if you count the one who doesn’t finish?”

  An ironic eyebrow. “You think all eight would read front to back?”

  “Not even my mother.”

  A wing of oversized shirt spread as she drew on the cigarette, paused, then with maddening languor said, “Don’t ask permission or forgiveness. It’s your choice. But don’t insult mine either.”

  “I didn’t mean,” Lyle said, and stopped. He looked away. He looked at the ground. He looked at his father. “Why don’t you go wait for Mom at the truck?” Lyle said. “I’ll catch up with you at the house later.”

  “But I’m just getting to know your friend,” Frank said.

  “Bri’s specialty is sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Ottoman expansionism,” Lyle said, very stiff, formal.

  “Ottoman. So what are you?”

  “Don’t answer that, Bri,” Lyle said, and to Frank, “What is wrong with you?”

  His father threw his arms up in right angles of surrender. “All I want to know is who I’m talking to.”

  Chapter 4

  The next afternoon, Lyle watched Bri Freeman undraw borders with the names of the past. Her hair was smooth, and one of her fists was a port and the other palm, skimming the air, was a ship, and she was talking about a time when most people had never seen people from other countries, other towns, and here is a cosmopolitan city. She was telling the story of a new human consciousness.

  “Maybe mountain was only a word you could conceive of as a large rock,” she said. “In the technology of traversing space, the imagination changes. There is more to hold in it.”

  After the conference, he took her out for drinks at a place that served booze in plastic cups. He brought back blue drinks, drinks with schnapps and curaçao to torture her. They sat at an uneven table pushed up against the wall paneling in the back of the bar. He apologized again for his father the night before. He explained this was a guy who hung an Italian flag in the living room above the television set, and he’d never even been to Italy.

>   Bri shrugged. With her mother, too, the notion of home was complicated. The disgust was complicated. Her mother saying of politics there, the villagers with their witchcraft. Bri said they’d never been religious. Her mother had come to the United States and gone to business school. She worked in HR. “And she was always trying to prove her transformation,” Bri said, eyes going distant. “I didn’t learn the language until college. But I suppose anyone wants to belong.”

  “And look at you in spite,” Lyle said.

  She shrugged again. He reached across the table. There was spilled wax hardened and greasy on the surface. “You were always the more gifted academic,” he said.

  She squeezed his hand. “Never was,” she said, “a competition.”

  He withdrew his hand, stared hard into the jukebox under shitty overhead lights. He thought of her at the conference that afternoon. He thought of how she’d always been so sure. It had never been in grad school that the explanations, clauses of qualifications, questions of whether one was or was not an internalist would cause Bri to lose track of her conclusions in the recitation of the facts that were her premise, all those pages blurring as they had in him. The massiveness of his admiration made him frantic, but he took a sip of his drink. “You’re a success,” he said.

  Chapter 5

  When Lyle Michaels called, Alexandra said: “It’s early your time.”

  “Which is right on time for you,” he said.

  “Seven, Friday the fourteenth?”

  “Friday the fourteenth, seven,” he said. “My time.”

  She placed the phone on the coffee table, returned to the laundry. This had been a choreographed call. Phone me at ten Sunday. I’ll be home. And of course, so would Jeremy.

  From his place on the sofa, he put down the newspaper, looked at her.

  “No interesting news in there?” she said, smoothing a shirt.

  “Very interesting, but you are more attractive than the PM.”

  She thought of something said by Shakespeare: “But love is blind, and lovers cannot see / The pretty follies that themselves commit.”

  Kant: “We are not rich by what we possess but by what we can do without.”

  “The substance of my life,” Murdoch said, “is a private conversation with myself which to turn into a dialogue would be equivalent to self-destruction.”

  So Alexandra kept, for preservation, her thoughts to herself, or at least from Jeremy. It would keep their life resolved as in fixed, not the chemical way that meant undoing into parts, becoming quotients. Out the window, the sun threw ballsy colors through the sky, and she said nothing of the Forrest or her brother, strange now and furtive but back, back, even if not here.

  Jeremy edged toward her on the couch, upsetting a tower of folded clothes. “I’ve got to get to the crisis center,” he said. “I should leave soon.”

  “Then who will leer at me?” Alexandra said, a pair of his underwear crumpled in a fist resting on her hip.

  “You could at least pretend not to be pleased,” he said, passing a pair of argyle woolens.

  “I’m not going to a crisis,” said Alexandra.

  On television, people in the audience of The Jeremy Kyle Show gasped together. There was the leaving of chairs. Cameras down passageways backstage. Teary returns. A woman slashed a pointing finger.

  “I could still buy a ticket to New York,” he said.

  “It wouldn’t be fun for you,” she said. “It will be old college friends and inside jokes.”

  “I could go to the galleries, walk around. It wouldn’t have to be every minute together.”

  “Don’t you know the movies say, if you love them, let them go?” she said.

  And of course, she did love him, but she had promised silence. It was the one thing she could give Shel.

  Jeremy pulled his arm down off the back of the couch. “Want to get rid of me?”

  “I’ve hired a hit man. You’d better watch your back. I’m in it for the life insurance.”

  “You can only get life insurance if you’re married.”

  “Lucky for you, then,” she said. “I have no reason to kill you.”

  Chapter 6

  Define need, Jeremy sent as he walked from the call center.

  Since he’d quit Strategic, he had rarely met Wright, but now Wright wanted to choose a loud bar where they wouldn’t be heard. A nightclub would be best. Sloppy dancers would let them alloy with strangers, and in splintering green strobes, most cameras would fail.

  Month of fools ’92 on our hands again.

  Jeremy deduced Wright was referring to April 1992, when every headline was a failure. On the day Gerry Adams lost his West Belfast seat and a bomb detonated by the IRA at the Baltic Exchange sent scenes of stained-glass angels spraying, there were three dead, ninety-one injured by the blast. “Not by the blast. By the Provos,” One Rock had told Jeremy.

  Impossible now, Jeremy responded to Wright. Or implored, perhaps.

  He chose a long route by foot. He’d take the way down Bayswater Road past Hyde Park through the wakening city. There was something to watching the earth wind around past a rotation, the day unfurling into the moody quiet of night listening, and the sky softening again dark to light. You can believe then that time revises trouble.

  Is it her? Wright wanted to know.

  It’s history repeating is always too clever by half.

  Because already in 1992 it had become difficult to remember where sides cut. In theory, the Intelligence Corps’ FRU worked to support the RUC Special Branch. De facto, Jeremy had seen that sometimes what they gave RUC were cursory scraps, and suspicion rooted beneath intel companies. Language had ceased to mean what it meant. Silence evidenced guilt in the Diplock Courts. Faith, Hope, and Charity tracked suspects. Radiation from British Army watchtower antennae had poisoned South Armagh locals, Sinn Féin claimed, and maybe it had been true.

  Hence requisite rendezvous.

  Jeremy let his hand skim hedges. He was already sweating, halfway home. The sun was being sucked up slow into the sky. He supposed it was only a meeting, an instance of logistics.

  The fourteenth then, Jeremy thumbed, while she’s away.

  Chapter 7

  He thought about Wright’s message. Month of fools ’92. He thought about it and knew there was nothing good to come of it. The last time he had believed any good could come of Northern Ireland was 1991.

  When Jeremy landed in Lisburn that year, they gave him a name to follow. Gunner. In retrospect, a poor alias. Facile. He arrived to Jeremy as paper before flesh: a file, text. Date of birth, criminal record, address. He was a Belfast arms liaison, moving lethal technologies to the republicans. Gas-operated guns from Estonian radicals. The PIRA sweetheart special: M16s. Then the British had caught him with a shipment of Degtyarev bullets powerful enough to leave a victim looking exploded instead of shot. On capture, they told him silence was the sound after a dead child hit the earth. Your boy is old enough to know fear, they said. Your boy with the condition. Secrets for the boy, they said. And it had been easy to turn him because the mother of the child was eighteen months in the grave. The first time he met Gunner, Jeremy stood in the basement of a fish shop in Shaftesbury, the smell of sea flesh clinging. There were boxes everywhere, an agony of newsprint. In an icebox, black fish eyes stared over gaping mouths. You could see the moment of recognition, the startled look that would stay forever. He slipped ice chips in his hands to clean them of rubbish.

  Gunner had selected a crate stacked over a pile of collapsed cardboard cartons, plunked down, and Gunner had brushed the metal wheel of a lighter with his thumb so that small blue flames hiccupped in his hand. “Got a clinker seat for the show. Will you not take one too?”

  “I prefer to stand,” Jeremy said, but something about Gunner’s smile made him feel foolish. Jeremy had not expected Gunner to be so boyish. T
he photograph in his pocket that day, small and grayscale, showed only a compromised head against cheap paint.

  “Like making it hard on yourself, do you, Allsworth?”

  “We’ve got business to attend to,” Jeremy said.

  “Protestant work ethic will fetch you supper, but it won’t win you time to eat it.”

  “I’m not a Protestant,” he said, flush running up his neck. “Or a Catholic for that matter.”

  “Everyone needs someone to pray to, Allsworth, even the English,” Gunner said.

  Jeremy had not known what to make of the man. He had groped for the tongue of someone in such a position. He had thought of what someone else, someone who did not turn red as jam, would say.

  “You talk a lot for a tout,” he said.

  A freezer groaned in the corner. “I suppose that’s what touts do.”

  Now, many years removed, Jeremy remembered how that one word had knocked off patina, and Jeremy remembered how when Gunner had finished snitching, he stood, face wrung out. Gunner had rubbed his thighs, straightened. He had a way of inviting looks with casual vigor. Jeremy remembered thinking it was a poor quality for a man with secrets. And Jeremy remembered the thought to touch his hand. They had not shaken on meeting, but his own swampy palm remained in his pocket. Do not extend to the informant, the trainers had advised. He will swallow kilometers.

  That afternoon, Gunner crossed the room. He paused at the door out of the shop basement, turned back abruptly so that the upstairs light bristled around him.

  “Cecil’s his name,” Gunner said, “my boy.”

  “I know,” Jeremy said.

  “And he’ll not be harmed now.”

  “I’ll make contact again soon,” said Jeremy.

  “Already he’s company. I burn a toast and he shouts, ‘Own goal.’”

  “You’re proud.”

  “Don’t have one of your own, so,” Gunner said. Jeremy bent down to lace his shoe. “You’re not a bad man, Allsworth. But are you decent?”