Quotients

by Tracy O'Neill

Chapter 4

  Look around and what’s school? It is the long line. It’s Crystal and her friends laughing raggedy-ass. School SOs with the contraband box straight-up full of beanies and Yu-Gi-Oh! cards. Hear: arms up for the detector. No baggies, no hats, no gum. Hands out. Of. Your. Pockets. They say that one, he likes patty-cake on the jeans a little too much.

  “Don’t even think about it, Mr. Brinkley.”

  Tyrell was thinking.

  There is staying in line for the metal detector, and there is turn around. Don’t go in, you never left. Absent: a term for a good day. What are the calculations?

  Must be three hundred of us. Rate of what a minute through the doors?

  “So long Tank Top gonna have a dick time we get to homeroom.”

  Tyrell looked to the left. He had $11.30 saved. He had his subway pass. Mr. Pence was smiling by his collection of confiscated fitteds, a big, stupid grin on his big, stupid face like a cereal leprechaun, head too big for any kind of headgear and how many times has he said the word disruption? Tyrell had an idea to distribute the numbers. Eleven-thirty is four bacon-egg-and-cheeses and three knockoff Gobstoppers. Suck and they last twenty-seven minutes. It is basic as swiveling out of the line.

  And why not? He is involved with huge things, and they have no idea. No one, not his mother, not Mr. Jordan, not Crystal, or Derek, or anyone, none of them had any idea. Epic. Outside the IRC they wouldn’t even believe. He was learning beyond cheats, learning into making whole new games. He was learning how to run a world like no one else seemed to know he could.

  Excel.

  So he turned chill and easy. Head down. Walk away. One Jordan past another eventually gets you home, whole place quiet, you and a soda tickling clean down the throat, a member of a big-time kind of group. They were going places.

  “The fuck,” he heard. But it was not about him. For a big boy, he was good at being a person no one noticed.

  And before he knew it, he was screen-center and killing it all legendary. Some point, he will take a break to chat. There are plans. There are things to learn can’t be taught in his PS.

  There are things to worry about too. Later, he’d leave the apartment. He’d come home the come-home time. It’s spaghetti night. The drill: no seconds until broccoli, all of it. Fuck broccoli. Fuck carrots. He had gotten no TV for a week recently for saying that.

  Sip the cola. No need for quiet now. Just power up and slay this RPG. But somehow, the big-breeze feeling was going cold in his stomach. Somehow, a wedge grew between brain and screen, and that wedge was his mother’s voice in the deep-down of him. He looked at the clock, and he thought of the minutes left before he was caught.

  Chapter 5

  It was just a couple of minutes of tape, but Alexandra found herself fighting with him, her dead brother. She caught herself thinking of comebacks and alternative evidence, what refuted him.

  You can tell Alexandra I said that.

  Lyle Michaels had never told her any of it.

  In fact, I want her to know. Because advertisers have no compunction about mining the prose of our lives to satisfy our worst impulses. Because we ask for convenience, and they give us a smaller world called customization. Because Wells Fargo used search data to decide who’d be offered something they called ghetto mortgages. Bull’s eye: targeted. Right in the crosshairs.

  She was angry then. So angry. She was red and she was mentally corroborating her own goodness with the events in her life, and she knew he had never taken the time to know her when he’d returned.

  But she rewound the file anyway. She kept her headphones on. And she listened again to this moment when her brother had still had a voice.

  Chapter 6

  Midafternoon. Alexandra and Han were asleep. A man’s voice came onto the radio, a stranger in the flat. Dial down the volume, you still the air. But his heartbeat.

  Jeremy held a cup he wouldn’t drink from. He did not have a brain for tea these days. He was all lit up. A piece of brown bread in the mouth tethered him.

  He took two quick laps around the building, a straight shot three, a left, a right, and another two laps around a building. In the street, men with umbrellas hooked at the crooks of their elbows complained that they didn’t know how to dress for this decade of weather. A girl stood by the subway station passing out flyers stamped with the words want to learn english? in English. She competed with a megaphoned man flanked by dancers selling the second coming of Christ. Men in fluorescent mesh vests stood by scaffolding, beckoning and backing a vehicle, and there was metal rolling everywhere, drilling. Jeremy tensed himself against the noise. He settled on the steps of someone else’s building. He had memorized the London number.

  “Mr. Lawrence is not available,” his secretary said. “Might I take down a message for you?”

  “No,” he said.

  At home, Alexandra and Han woke shortly before dinner. Jeremy lifted steamed asparagus onto a plate. Alexandra wanted to tell him about the most beautiful dream she’d had. They went to a rocky cliff to visit her brother, and he was an old man.

  “When do I stop thinking of all the hypotheticals I was too slow to precipitate?” Alexandra said.

  Chapter 7

  My brother was a dreamer, she wrote to Lyle Michaels.

  Chapter 8

  Lyle nearly enjoyed getting tired. He sat with his father and at lunch peeled the deli paper back over the roast beef on a toasted. In the truck, Frank would scream obscenities over unmemorable traffic dramas. There should have been beauty to whitening walls, the possibility of homes afresh, nothing exceptional, a gratifying thought.

  With his first paycheck, he bought fresh greens and salmon steaks, Icelandic yogurt thick with fat. At home, he readied the fish with delicate pieces of dill and chopped salad, laid out buttered slabs of bread flecked with pink salt. He turned on a Northern soul record. He had asked Ingrid for a conversation. He had specified over dinner. It’s how it’s always been done. Talk over dinner. This is his daughter’s mother.

  And maybe, despite it all, there were certain unbroken rhythms. The patting of the back barely bigger than his hand. A swoop of spoon to clean the dribbling lip of puree of something rooted. Gestures of fatherhood.

  An alarm sounded.

  “Did you hear that?” Lyle asked Marina. “The oracle hath spoken. Bedtime.”

  He swiped her mouth once, twice with a towel. Then a little flutter of terry cloth on her nose until she laughed. He picked her up and carried her, the down of her head on his cheek, into the bedroom with the mobile of extinct animals cluttering the space above the crib.

  “Once upon a time,” he said, “there was a paleontologist named Marina.”

  The story-time voice in his own mouth soothed him, got the cadence of sleep and simple morals hushing down the noise of the city, the wide world of news. He was speaking, but it was the ancient communication of Fahrenheit transference from her whole small body to his chest that he heard. It had been foolish to contact Cain. Cain of course would only have denied his part in it. All Cretans lie, says the Cretan, McCreight had said. Or maybe death was a coincidence. What was left was to fold back into the daily duties, tucking in. Lyle turned the mobile so that a Jurassic swirl suspended overhead, a churning history of fallen beasts.

  “Nod if you’re asleep,” Lyle whispered. “Okay, then.”

  Ingrid arrived soon after, face tight and holding a six-pack of beer. She opened one and sat at the table. She turned off his music and began to play a band out of her phone.

  Before they were over, he’d been proud to be introduced by Ingrid at parties. At the reception for her first film premiere, oglers futzed with lurid soft cheese spreading off the rind just to get close. People praised her. They called her a light-shedder, a truth-teller, and they were right. That night, he had asked of her forever. Ingrid had married Lyle Michaels in a dress purchased for three dollars,
and it had seemed then that she corroborated his own weight, his wife with yellowing sleeves and holes at her collar who voted in local elections and worried globally in the form of films. After town hall, her friends filled a dive, drank cheap whiskey. He had wanted them all to leave so he could touch her face, but then someone bought him a shot. The music was angry young white men screaming over simple chords. He wished they had done it differently.

  In the living room, he laid out mismatched bowls, individual dishes lost from other people’s sets and purchased from dusty shops. They were quiet and the apartment was stuffed with radiator heat. He thought maybe he could become a sports reporter, observe locker rooms for the rest of his life. He could memorize statistics, Cinderella stories pick-and-rolled through the paint. Start over.

  Ingrid went to the kitchen, and he could hear the open and close of the refrigerator that meant she was taking another beer. Tomorrow, he would email around, say he was looking to get on the sports beat. Do grant writing. Technical copy. He could be a man who wrote manuals from home. White papers. There was supposed to be money in white papers. Or he would keep on working for his father.

  He followed her to the kitchen. He put his hand on her arm, and she was very stiff, but he thought maybe there was nothing to risk in the idea, saying it. He held her elbows.

  “I was wrong,” Lyle said.

  “I know,” she said.

  But she had chosen him once.

  And so by the dirty dishes, he promised difference. He imagined she would not have to attend faculty meetings. He imagined that she would follow her muses freely. Lyle knew they’d never really tried, but they could. They could try harder, try differently. There were jobs he could do that came with health insurance. And Marina could have two parents in one home.

  “I’m not sure my partner would like that,” Ingrid said.

  Lyle let his hand drop. “You’re seeing someone?”

  “Have been.”

  “You didn’t tell me.”

  Ingrid adjusted her hands around her elbows. She gazed at the stove. “That’s because you make every conversation about your book.”

  He picked up the baby monitor, a precaution his daughter was no longer supposed to need, and turned it in his hand. Nothing had changed, but it felt as though it had. A closure. It was not that you could have what you’d had. It was that you’d had it. You’d had it, and that didn’t make it, whatever it is was, any closer. To think differently was to confuse being born for the possibility of being reborn. “Why did you give up?” he asked finally.

  “Why ask now?” she said.

  “Because I didn’t then.”

  Ingrid picked up the bag and her scarf. She wound it around her neck. “You confused being impressive for loved,” she said. “I wanted the second one.”

  In the weeks after, he sat in his mother’s kitchen with a newspaper and coffee. She didn’t say anything about Lyle having quit working with his father. Instead she set out a long cheese Danish in a tin, and everything was yellow beneath the overhead lamp, while the middle-aged television on the counter fuzzed on. It seemed this was the entire day, sitting with the news, the gurgling images and convenience food.

  His father came home at six and had a plate. Sausage and peppers. Strong-crust bread. He complained about the president, the media. The media with their ideas and never news that was facts.

  “Which media?” Lyle said. “I was the media.”

  But in retrospect, he’d never been a good reporter. It was clear to Lyle now his one true skill was faith in flattery. He had trusted an anonymous tipster because he wanted to trust the blandishments. He was sure now Cain was the man who’d told him to contact McCreight, and he was sure he had not asked more questions because he wanted to trust he was a man who looked like he could write a nationally important story.

  Cain had never thought much of Lyle. It was why he’d been chosen, which was to say, used. He was an easy pawn, the man without the fact-checking team, the disgraced. If the plan went wrong, who would believe the purveyor of sex video stories? To the people he’d cared about, there was no lower than the fallen tabloid reporter, and it was who he would always be in the long, permanent web of stories, linked and relinked, tagged and optimized to point out his worst work as the most relevant item to his person.

  Chapter 9

  Death broke on Cathexis, grief pushing lower articles Lyle had once enjoyed as it inched down the log in garish red sunset pictures and cross iconography. The mourners typed to his profile or on their own—we love you, Lyle—and the pictures ran his life. Alexandra looked at the photographs of him as a teenager, then one of him her son’s age. He held out a caterpillar in his palm, an offering.

  In succinct online eulogies, classmates and old colleagues remembered him as always convicted. Sometimes, there was an instance. Other times, it was a habit. How when you got together, he’d ask what was the latest grievance. And he meant it. He wanted to know the worst.

  In this way, he was reduced.

  But what Alexandra returned to most was what his father Cathected. Mr. Michaels wrote his Ly, he remembered this one time when he went to see him give a debate. He didn’t know why he remembered it except he looked up on the stage that night. His son was never much at sports, not even cards. He was a whiner, he gave up too easy, he’d never been strong. But when he looked up that night, he didn’t see his son, the snotty little shit who never did what it takes. He saw a fighter orating like a president in a circle of light. There were flashes going off in the seats, all these people taking pictures. He saw heads nodding. He heard applause. This man was poking his voice in the hot auditorium, and he had everyone in there, was beating the other guy while everyone watched. Frank Michaels hadn’t known to see his kid that way, and then he did: his son had that survivor fire of their family, the Micelli fight in his heart, and it made Mr. Michaels want to punch his hand up in the air. He didn’t know what had happened to that. Why’d you have to do it, Ly? he wrote. We loved you.

  Chapter 10

  Alexandra showed Jeremy the Cathected things and a newspaper article in the window of her phone screen. He was just home from work, and he slung a jacket over the back of a chair so that it drooped like a diminished man. He was saying an alternative to her. He urged her to believe that Lyle Michaels had killed himself.

  “And yet,” she said.

  “Even if he didn’t,” Jeremy said.

  “He didn’t.”

  Han was rolling trains. He smashed them. He made noises like apocalypse. And maybe it was. Lyle Michaels was the new evidence. She’d assimilated him. She could see his death as a point in a line, a surface straight enough to hold the wrong she knew. It fit. His death fit. It was them again who killed.

  “If it were true that he didn’t,” Jeremy continued, “you can’t go to the press. There is danger. You must think of that. You must think of yourself, and Han.”

  “He didn’t,” she said, because she could not unlatch from the idea simple as opening the clasp of a necklace and because though it was not quite hope in her, she wanted him to believe what she did, to reflect her suspicions, turn them back, so that his seeing what she saw would make it weighted and true. A real origin to pain.

  “You’re a mother now.”

  “I know who I am responsible to,” she said. “He had people who cared about him.”

  “Doesn’t mean anything,” Jeremy said. “People give up.”

  It was possible, she thought, to turn a death inside out so that its victim appeared to be the instigator. It was not possible Lyle Michaels had killed himself. He had a daughter.

  “You are finding the evidence to match the theory,” Jeremy said.

  “I’m telling you there are connections. Shel was trying to warn me.”

  “By disappearing from you.”

  Her hand dropped a glass.

  “I’m sorry
,” he said.

  Chapter 11

  Han tugged at Alexandra’s sleeve. He pointed to a device on his lap. “Baba says it is sixty-two degrees in São Paolo, Brazil, with a fifteen-two chance of rain.”

  “Fifty-two,” Alexandra said. “Less chance.”

  For a while they swiped through cities, and Jeremy made a drink in the kitchen. He went to the doorway and watched. Han had made paper trains that he taped to the lower edge of the wall in the living room, his bedroom, these candy-colored conga lines of steam engines and cabooses, wrapping around the world of their home. He’d cut and colored and he could name them. It seemed so recent his only word had been a monster. He used to be afraid of the other character, the green one. But Jeremy had brought Han recently to an exhibition at the children’s museum. He’d guided Han’s hand along a wall covered with swatches of synthetic puppet fur. See, it isn’t so scary.

  “Everything good in my life, I think of how he’ll never see it,” Alexandra said now, shaking her head. “As though that were the point of his life, to validate mine.”

  Jeremy set the drink on a coaster for her. “Or as though you want to share your happiness.”

  One day, he must believe, she would quarantine the tragic.

  He had done it.

  He could not tell her he had done it.

  He could not tell her of a time when senses piled in concentric circles of near-boredom and imminent stir, moments sharpening, electric, and all the rude glamour of news arriving like memories, happened and familiar and warped. He could not tell her of when he came to believe you could count on certain things if you stayed in Northern Ireland long enough to cease being a stunned optimist, things like bodies turning up in the familiar style: stripped, beaten, bags over heads with bullet holes. He could not tell her he had cared for one of the dead men in his own way and that nonetheless after some time it was clear that the dead were not real anymore, and so you learned to live.