Condit did not seem to me like one of these disgruntled old men who would be loaded into a paddy wagon in handcuffs and a blanket saying, “If it weren’t for you meddling kids, I would have gotten away with it.” No, Condit was the type to kill your dog and give your daughter copies of Henry Miller.
When I got home, Annie told me that Condit had come to the door dressed up like the paperboy coming to collect. I asked her what that meant and she said he had one of those newspaper bags and he was wearing a gray jumpsuit, like coveralls. Annie said he was there to collect for the papers. He had a receipt book. Annie called the Journal and found out that he was, in fact, the carrier for our route.
We found color photocopies of old photographs of Condit and his family in with the paper. When she opened it, they would flutter onto the kitchen table. One showed him and his wife and kid out in front, the kid on a bike with training wheels, Condit in his military uniform with his hands on his hips, his wife clutching a pocketbook, her hair impeccable. In another, Condit and his wife were in their bed with the sheets and blankets pulled up to their necks. The wife’s brassiere hung from the bedpost, and a son and daughter were on either side of the bed with trays of breakfast. The next photo that came showed Condit’s wife alone in the bed. She was much older, an IV threading up her forearm to a bag of fluid hanging limply from its stand. She was trying to make a good show of it, but you could see the defeat in her face: slack mouth, dark eyes, unkempt hair. The next was a headstone engraved: MARY ELIZABETH CONDIT 1956–2003.
The night we found the photograph of the headstone, I dreamed that Annie and I were vacationing on a houseboat. Our baby (I dreamed we had a girl, which we did) was older, maybe thirteen, draped over the boat rails in shorts and an Old Navy T-shirt. She was reading Seventeen magazine. Annie was next to her, reading Tender Is the Night, absently pumping a drinking straw up and down into a tall glass of iced tea. My daughter looked up at Annie, who smiled and said, “I think you’re prettier than those girls.”
“Mom,” our daughter sighed, turning the page.
I was steering the boat. We lounged around that way for what seemed like hours. Then we anchored and ate dinner. Later, I played old Oasis and Dave Matthews songs on a nylon-string guitar. Our daughter sang harmony. Annie finally smiled and eventually joined in, and we played until it began raining. Buckets of rain. We secured everything and went inside and went to sleep with blue flashes of lightning throwing shadows at odd sudden angles. In the midst of one such flash of lightning, I saw Condit’s face for an instant, rain streaming down his nose, flying from the rim of his stoma as he exhaled.
He was above us, clinging to the ceiling like Spider-Man, a pistol jammed into a belt he wore strapped around his gray coveralls. By the time I could rouse Annie, a second flash of lightning burned through the cabin and Condit was gone. Then I arose and found a large fireman’s ax secured to the kitchen wall, took it down, and crept with it to the rear of the boat. As I fumbled with the catch on the sliding glass door, there was another flash of lightning and Condit materialized on the deck, holding the pistol against his stoma so the barrel pointed to one side and the chamber was flat against his throat. He began speaking in gibberish, advancing slowly toward me, his hair strewn with some sort of mucilaginous river muck, the muscles in his neck and hands wound like a winch. Another flash of lightning. More gibberish. Ax. Pistol. Lightning. Condit.
Then Annie woke me. “You were having a nightmare,” she said.
I looked around the room, a gentle blue light misted the walls. The covers were heaped at the foot of the bed. It was 2:44. Annie asked me if I was okay. I said, “Yeah, I want to get some milk or something.” Then I pulled the sheets back onto the bed and tucked her in and told her not to worry, but she knew better. Her face said, Steven, I know that when you say, “Don’t worry,” you really mean, “If I can keep you in the dark, then I won’t have to worry about you, too.” She sat upright in the bed as I left the room and descended the stairs. I did not want to think too much about what was going through her head. This need not have happened. We could have chosen a thousand different paths.
We could have, should have used a realtor. We could have worked out something else with my mother. We could have waited. I brought this on, that much was clear to me. I wanted to find a different path. I wanted to buck the system. That was all me. For whatever reason I felt like we could never make enough money to own the kind of house I felt was appropriate. My father had spent so much of his life trying to do more than simply put a roof over our heads. He wanted a home to mean something to us, to be something we would all take pride in. He did. He was always gathering people at the house, calling them home. I was the oldest, and he had worked on me the hardest, unable to help his youngest, the prodigal.
I stood at the window, looking out on the predawn blueness of the neighborhood, contemplating everything that had happened since that day I decided to go for it. The dream I had that night had nearly driven me to give up on the whole project, but Annie and the baby inside her preserved my resolve to forge on.
During my meditation, I saw movement outside near the street. Condit’s outline popped into the morning sky above a line of hedges at the street. He lifted a bulky, top-heavy weapon of some kind to his shoulder. I hit the floor, hearing only a thwip outside followed by a thwap on the front window. Right after that, there came more thwips followed by more thwaps. I stood slowly, gingerly, and three huge red splatters covered the window. Condit’s outline flittered against the blue morning. I went back to the kitchen and got a roll of paper toweling and some Windex. Annie called from upstairs, “What was that racket?” I told her it was my mother on the phone and that something fell against the window.
“Go back to sleep,” I said. “I’m taking care of it.”
After Condit paintballed the house, an old Ryder moving truck arrived with the decals peeled off and dust coating the panels. You could still make out the letters on the side—they were a shade lighter than the rest of the vehicle. It was parked in front of the neighbor’s, and for three days we saw no one coming or going from either it or the house. The FOR SALE sign had been taken down while we were at work, but we did not see hide nor hair of the new neighbors. Just the truck.
One night, a day after the truck appeared, a thin strip of yellow light beamed from underneath the roll-up door. I went out to have a look and found nobody in the house or in the cab, which was tidy except for a milk crate lined with a garbage sack and filled with old fast-food wrappers and cups.
ANOTHER COUPLE OF DAYS PASSED, and there was no sight of the neighbors. I was out on the sidewalk in front of the house, pulling weeds in the median between the sidewalk and street, when the door on the truck slid up, and Condit was standing there in his pajamas with a toothbrush in his mouth. He looked at me and spat a white gob of foam onto the street, where it hit next to several dry but similarly shaped splotches. He took the small silver wand from his robe pocket and lifted it to his throat. “HOWDY NEIGHBOR,” he croaked, and then drew his forearm across his mouth.
The interior of the truck had been set up like a small traveling bachelor pad: twin bed, chest of drawers, a recliner and a stack of magazines, a small table with a windup alarm clock, and a small hand crank AM/FM/short-wave radio. Two coolers were stacked one on top of the other up front, and he had a few of those inspirational posters of mountains, oceans, and golf courses taped to the walls. “WHAT A DRAG IT IS GETTING OLD,” he said.
I laughed a little, despite my petrification. “Mother’s Little Helper?” I asked. “My dad listened to the Stones.”
Condit looked confused.
“‘Kids are different today … I hear every mother say …’” I sang.
He shrugged.
“Never mind,” I said. He shrugged again. I got tense, started breathing through my nose. “What the hell have you been doing to us?” I growled.
“GOING DOWN FIGHTING,” he said, then he reached up and grabbed the door and pulled it down. �
�JUSTICE IS MINE.”
I stood in the street frozen between the urge to knock on the truck door and the urge to call the cops, and then the fight left me. For no good reason at all I saw clearly that Condit was playing the game of I’m not touching you. You know, where one kid sitting next to another kid in the car will hover the flats of his hands over the face, arms, and legs of the other kid. I used to do it to my brother, made him scream, “Tell Steven to leave me alone!” My mother would whirl around, her finger poised, her mouth thin, compressed, and snarling. “I’m not touching him,” I would say, showing how my hands were not, in fact, touching his body.
“Then stop not touching him,” she would say. “Don’t touch him and don’t not touch him. Just keep your hands to yourself, young man.”
And why did I do it? you might ask. Because it was the only power I had.
3
The Dr. Science Show
“Other materials respond weakly …”
I HAD WRITTEN THAT SENTENCE a dozen times in a half hour in the margins of a legal pad before I realized I wasn’t even looking at the page. When I looked down, I saw that I had somehow doodled three or four drawings of the Earth’s magnetic field, and a side sketch of a horseshoe magnet with a horse’s head, mane, and tail coming out of the curve at the middle. The poles of my horse-magnet featured thick shoes, not horseshoes, but the kind of hobo shoes you see in a cartoon.
Elsewhere on the pad I’d written the following notes:
acts differently at a distance
1 tesla = 10,000 gauss
the force is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between objects.
There was a drawing on another page showing a line of kids stretching off toward the horizon wearing T-shirts with the horse-magnet design on them. I indicated that each child should be holding a sign that says 1, 1/4, 1/9, 1/16, and so on. Why did I do this? Because kids have a hard time with concepts like “inverse proportionality.” In all reality, most adults have a hard time with science for all the reasons you’ve heard before.
Those few pages were all I had to take with me to the writer’s meeting for my television program, Dr. Science. Normally I’m literally overflowing with ideas, but I took a personal day because I had recently discovered my wife was having an affair with a man you’ve probably heard of. His name is Chuck Vogel. He’s also from television. Reality television, oxymoron that it is. Because of Vogel and my wife, I found I didn’t have much to say to children about anything. My discovery of their infidelity was the beginning of the end. The worm was turning. The phoenix would rise, and fear not, for the phoenix here is me, but not yet, not while I was still dozing at my notebook.
With this story meeting on the horizon, I tried to gather myself together, but came back obsessively to the phrase “other materials respond weakly.” I realized that during my reverie I’d been tracing over the letters until I had nearly cut through the sheet with my pen.
A day earlier, while I was still blessed with ignorance about my cuckoldry, I had what now seems like an ironically pathetic obsession with the phrase “opposites attract.” This can be true in so many different ways. I leafed further back in my notebook and found four or five intricately drafted pages devoted to that idea. One page was a dense list of attractive contraries: ice cream and hot fudge, mouth and ear, gun and elk, man and woman, et cetera. On another page, I drew a picture of some boys huddled together and a similar group of girls a distance from them. I captioned it: Middle School, Fall Mixer, then drew in magnetic lines of force passing through the heads of the girls and the groins of the boys.
I thought to myself after the Chuck Vogel news that it seems I got it the wrong way around.
A ping came from my computer, and thirty seconds later my secretary called me on the phone. “Did you get my email?” she asked. I wheeled around to the computer and woke it. Her message was sitting on top of three from Merilese, my wife’s personal assistant, and one from Asa Kirschbaum, my best friend.
My wife is Barbara Stein. I probably should mention that. Unless you’ve been in a coma for the last ten years, you know who she is. According to her marketing people, eight out of ten people have one or more of her books in their house, TiVo her shows, subscribe to her magazines, download her podcasts. I’d put even money on the fact that you’ve said her trademark phrase, “Ain’t life sweet,” at least once in your life, even if you didn’t want to. Maybe you did it ironically. Most people do these days.
Everyone in this little triangle of infidelity is famous, and that adds a surreal dimension to it. Anyway, my wife is so ridiculously busy that we communicate indirectly, through one of the three or four assistants she burns through in a year. Part of me thought that it wouldn’t be beneath Barb to farm off the affair to this Merilese person, the new meat. So much for wishful thinking.
The subject lines of Merilese’s emails read as follows:
FW: RE: TELL HER TO GO TO HELL!!!!!!!!!!!!
RE: TELL HER TO GO TO HELL!!!!!!!!!!!!
Meet BS for Lunch at TRIBECA BISTRO?
I didn’t really have the patience to reread any of these emails, so I choose the message that had come from my friend Asa instead.
Asa is a puppeteer. Strangely, he is both more and less of a celebrity than any of us. Though you wouldn’t know him from a hole in the ground, you are without a doubt acquainted with his alter ego, Milo, the purple monster from the Parents’ Choice Award–winning television show Milo’s Treehouse. Asa has made millions on the licensing, which (and here’s Asa in a nutshell) he used to build an avant-garde Hebrew puppet theater in the Bronx called Alef-Ayin.
The theater effectively turned Milo into Asa’s day job, and the networks knew it. People in the know said the quality of Milo’s Treehouse dropped a few years ago. I couldn’t tell you if it did or didn’t, but people in the know always say the quality of your show is dropping, no matter what kind of energy you’re putting into it. They worry you’ll end up coasting if you’re not afraid.
I had a meeting scheduled later in the week with some consultants the network brought on board to help us update my program, The Dr. Science Show, which I had run by myself nearly as long as Captain Koala and Mr. Plaid Pants had run theirs. Technically I was an executive producer, but I’d been told it was no longer up to me to run it alone. There are no auteurs in television, they said. PBS had a lot of stakeholders, and we could no longer expect the taxpayers to treat us like Amtrak. No one who actually makes children’s television ever uses a word like “stakeholder,” which is why I knew my time in the business was almost up.
Asa’s email had no subject line (his signature move). The message said, Wanna get a slice? I emailed him back and said, Writer’s meeting until noon. I’ll meet you at Ray’s around twelve thirty. The millennials we all worked with were dumbfounded that we still used email. We took a certain delight in the agitation. As I sent the mail, I heard my secretary sigh into the phone and ask if I was still there. I said yeah, and she told me Merilese had been terrorizing the phones since eight. I told her to hold all my calls unless it’s Asa.
“That’s what you always say.”
“Well, I must mean it, then,” I said, and then hung up the phone.
When I arrived at the meeting, the room was already bristling. It was located in the network building on the East Side, with a view of the Queensboro Bridge. There was glass on all sides and a long, kidney-shaped table full of Danishes, coffee, and clipboards. The producer, Devin Hamblin, was at one end of the table. She was wearing the women’s uniform: heap of hair, rectangular glasses, black turtleneck, gray tights, miniskirt. Pablo and Laura were kibitzing over some design magazine. The two of them were in the uniform that was in style two uniforms ago. Pablo wore his hair shaved close. He was goateed, wearing a bowling shirt with the name GLENN embroidered over the pocket in red. Laura’s clothes were too tight and the color of dime-store candy. On the other side of the table, Sage and Emily were sitting in isolation, Sage reading a comic book
and Emily thumb-typing into an iPhone. There was an open chair opposite Devin’s—Asa would have asked, “Is this one saved for Elijah?” I tried that line once, and people just stared at me, so I said nothing, which was better for me in the long run.
“Oh, good,” Devin said, “You’re here … finally.” When Devin spoke, her lips moved but her teeth remained motionless. It could have been TMJ, but I think it was more likely an affectation she picked up in college. I apologized and told the room that I was working on the magnetism show and time got away from me.
Emily stopped typing and said, “Einstein said time is affected by gravity, not magnetism. We’ll need a complete unified field theory before that excuse will hold water,” then she chuckled to herself without looking up. Sage lowered his comic book and looked over at Emily then shook his head and turned the page. Pablo checked his phone, which apparently had nothing new to offer, so he set it on the table.
That’s how those meetings went. Ostensibly those people were the best and brightest in the field. We pulled Pablo away from The Spongeguy at the height of its success, lowered his salary, and told him he’d be making a difference, that The Dr. Science Show was one of the last things television does to keep kids out of jail. Turns out he’d been deeply influenced by our show as a kid and had erased all of his parents’ cassette tapes with an electromagnet I taught him how to build in one of my first programs. He was a super-fan, which we could manipulate.
The rest of them had the job because they like living in New York, except Emily, who had taken this job to keep herself from going back to graduate school for a second PhD.
I passed my sketches to Devin, who projected them on the back wall of the meeting room.
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