Steel Animals

by SK Dyment

  “He was attacked. What does he mean? I don’t always know. He has fits, sees ghosts, sees all kinds of spirits coming to get him….”

  “You! You!” he shouts again and begins to rise from his chair.

  “Oh dear,” says Jackie.

  “He’ll be all right,” says the young woman.

  “We’ll come back,” says Jackie.

  The two of them sweep back out into the street, Olesya in her tangerine coat, followed by incoherent shouts.

  “Do you have any money?” Jackie asks her.

  “Only a banking card.”

  “I thought so,” Jackie glances across the street at the beer umbrellas rocking in the wind.

  “There is a small bank a block down,” she tells her, as if she is giving orders to an officer of the military. She gives her a friendly punch in the arm. “They will be fucking like rabbits in that store, so you go get money while I go keep the beer drinkers occupied. Whatever you do, be sure to kill a little time. Don’t come directly to the bar , or else the two of them may come out looking for Wanda.”

  “You’ve handled everything perfectly,” says Olesya. “Isn’t cheating what life is all about? I think so!” She blows Jackie an unexpected kiss.

  “I will see you in a while then,” Jackie answers, and dashes into the street. “After you have finished killing a little time,” she remarks to herself.

  At last she sees what all the noise is on the bar side of the block. The police have told the unemployed and homeless people who have been hired to carry corporate banners in this faux protest to get off the street. But because they are temporarily employed and have no fixed address, and because the official representatives of the corporation that they are carrying signs for are not there, the police have no one to take aside. The homeless people continue to march. Each one has ten of a promised twenty bucks in their pockets for an hour of chanting and waving signs advertising trendy new Internet shopping. The police have brought vans to carry these people away, and they are beginning to scatter in fear just as the corporate reps arrive back with their megaphones and the rest of their promised money from a late martini lunch.

  “You can’t arrest them, we rented this sidewalk!”

  The police shout at the protestors to break up the picket, while the PR men shout at them to stay. There are clearly going to be some arrests. The media has been called ahead of time to photograph the whole thing.

  Jackie walks back into the bar where Ben and Vespa are discussing the day their mother led the Swiss police on a cross-country motorcycle chase before she was arrested for possession of an unregistered 500cc Condor in a small Swiss village by a lake. Now everyone outside on the street is getting arrested, it strikes Jackie, everyone except Olesya. Striding past the bank where the protestors have created a tangle of traffic, Olesya is spotted by the bank employees, who smoke cigarettes and discuss the recent robbery. They are watching the corporate picket campaign and the media snapping pics. Finally, one of them reluctantly tells an officer who is on the scene in response to the alarm.

  “Look! That’s her!”

  Olesya stops and looks about her, wondering if it was wise to leave Wanda alone. She regains her step, and decides to head back to her apartment to get the other bank card in her other purse. How long will it will take Wanda to have sex, she wonders. She breaks into a light jog, something she is used to doing only on the treadmill at her gym, and three police officers break into a trot behind her. It is difficult to lose anyone dressed in a plastic tangerine jacket with green and yellow scarves. Olesya almost runs by her apartment—it is such an everyday trendy place, built almost overnight by B.F.Turner Consolidated, the politically incorrect construction company. As she has said before, she can never figure out why politically incorrect things are always such a big deal. She pauses, realizing that she also has the keys to her girlfriend’s apartment. Olesya realizes she is in love. More even than with shoes. Her heart is suddenly aching, a surprise-feeling, because Olesya has always told herself she can bail out if she gets too emotionally involved with women, and go back to non-emotionality with men.

  From the other side of the potted cedars at the foot of her building, four male police officers watch as Olesya nibbles her thumbnail, pondering the new emotion. Many floors above their suspect, an African violet begins a slide from its vinyl plant-mat to the street below. The plant picks up speed as it plummets. The officers following Olesya divide up and begin to prepare an arrest.

  Jackie, feeling flush, orders a plate of Nudle s houbami each for Ben and Vespa. “Didn’t I just bring you a plate?” the server asks. Apparently, the group has not even noticed she was gone.

  The African violet strikes Olesya on the head and she hits the pavement. The police cuff her and call an ambulance. The spores of the violet disperse explosively into the dirty New York City spring air at the same moment as the shoe salesperson gets his horn deeply into Wanda. The violet finds an inventive place to plant a seed while the police load Olesya onto a stretcher and pop her into a security ward with seven money-stubborn junkies and an ad rep concussed by a slap and a megaphone blow on the head. Ben looks up from his finished plate with a self-satisfied look just as Wanda wavers across the street to the terrace of umbrellas, lurching into the dark, comforting atmosphere inside. She is happy, but slightly off balance, having drunk champagne deeply from a hundred-dollar shoe.

  17.

  “FATHER,” SAYS RUDY, “I have slain thee.” He has escaped them all now and set up his next phase of operations deep in the Adirondack forest, where no one can ever come. Soon, he will overthrow the patriarchy, but first, he must process what has come to pass. He gazes down at the rack of a magnificent white-tailed stag. Since white-tailed deer are not in the habit of looking up, it is easy to observe them from his platform in a tree and to watch them as they come and go, along with the other animals and birds that live in the forest. A family of chipmunks live at the foot of Rudy’s tree, and he realizes they are the most delightful and energetic animals he has ever seen. Long before he was able to see them, he would hear their sound in the morning, a low repeating cry like a woodwind instrument being struck against a fallen log. He has been in this treetop perch for over a week, unravelling. The disappearance of B.F. is weighing most heavily on his soul. The game that B.F. played the most with Rudy was that of intimidation, threats, and ridicule. Rudy has to wonder why he had slipped so far into Turner’s pit of games. Even though it was never mentioned between them, one of the largest games in the boardroom had been Rudy’s art of sales talk that ultimately won the envy of his colleagues. He was tuned in to the needs of B.F, became able to sense things long before the others. This emotional charade between them had suddenly snapped with the firing of the gun, and now that he was able to contemplate it, he was forced to face a tidal wave of emotions he had carried with him since the day he had been hired, long before he found the inside track.

  “Wasn’t I the voice in the boardroom that asked non-violent questions, the investigating questions? Yes, I was. I wanted to know if it would be necessary to frighten or intimidate another politician or developer in order to push a plan. Not that I wouldn’t do it. I just loved that clarity. Just loved it.”

  A chipmunk leaps through a dapple of sunlight and runs vertically up a neighbouring maple, as if it is listening and is suddenly invigorated by what he had said.

  B.F. knew every man’s hang-ups and intimate weaknesses. It was an Old Boy’s Club where Rudy played the role of the only other adult in the room, while Turner was the furious father. The men around Rudy had been handpicked and would carry out orders to the letter, even commit what came close to murder. A sense of belonging was more important to them than their own dignity. Their vulnerabilities were something B.F. did not directly torment them with, but everyone knew he kept a blackmail file on each man a mile thick.

  B.F. Turner had liked that Rudy challenged his big-crime bl
uster and considered Rudy a shot of fresh blood. He knew that inside Rudy, a small, shy child was simply satisfied that he had beaten his own monsters for another day and won the approval of the dragon.

  Rudy had survived only by being an intimate disciple and slave to B.F’s moods. And the reward system he enjoyed was seeing B.F. lash out at another instead of lash out at him. Finally, like the others, thinking he was above the charade, he had become only another subservient son. Now that he has killed the father, Rudy has lost all guidance. He knows he has committed the gravest sin. Even the hand of God will not reach out to comfort him in his terror, he is certain. And he knows he has to pull himself together. He watches the chipmunks and pens a poem in his notebook:

  With each familiar passing

  The arranger of order and grace

  Displaces the structure of chaos

  And leaves fallen leaves in their place.

  It is all that he wants to write for now because of the scolding sound that the animals and birds make, and the suddenly curious faces of the whiskered creatures that live around him. He is aware that he is the newcomer again, and these animals do not approve his arrival. It’s not a very good poem, but the idea that destruction has a place appeals to him. He has been studying the writing of Zen monks and their disciples, and it seems to him that they wrote short verses that had great significance. Despite his negative feelings, Rudy derives pleasure from the realization that everything on the forest floor has been put there within moments of his eyes falling upon it because some creature, insect, bird, or incidental action of the wind placed it there and nowhere else. He makes it his business to notice these beautiful arrangements if it is their wish to be seen. In many of the Zen Buddhist poems he is reading, he encounters the word, “indulgence.”

  “I am indulging in the forest with my senses,” he tells himself. And, he is reading other poets. In fact, that is almost all that he has brought with him to read. He reads Kerouac, who spent sixty-three days in a mountaintop shack as a fire look-out, surrounded, like Rudy, with bears and chipmunks and deer and endless marching miles of rock face and trees.

  “‘A blade of grass jiggling in the winds of infinity, anchored to a rock, and for your own poor gentle flesh no answer,’” Rudy reads aloud. He decides Kerouac wrote with an obligatory tone because he felt that he had to record his experience of isolation, not because his isolation brought him revelations that he had to record. He uses Kerouac’s text to start his fires in the little portable stove he has brought with him up on his perch. Rudy has eaten many things; his staple being the sprouts that he is trying to grow in jars housed in a cupboard made of crates. He gathers berries, reads about edible plants from a wild-crafting book, and writes to himself day and night. He contemplates his murder of B.F. and resolves that he acted with his wild, natural human side, which he embraces as much as his good side, a side he has seen very little of until now. After ten days, he resolves to focus only on his good self, having passed through the flames of self-torment that occurred a few days after he was cleared in the shooting death of his employer. He reads Thoreau and copies into his book a paraphrase of a sentence that intrigues him: “‘I find in myself an instinct towards a higher, spiritual life, and another towards a primitive and savage one, and I reverence them both.’”

  Rudy is comforted. He is trying to release his spirit from the three passions: greed, anger, and ignorance. He lies awake at night staring at the stars and contemplates the four great wisdoms of Zen Buddhism. Then he contemplates rising above the conceptual area of the profane and the sacred, outside of arguments based upon differentiation. He is living a simple life—a life structured around chants that he invents himself, things that he reads in ancient poetry, and more contemporary poets that strike him as relevant to his search. When a family of birds break through their shells in the tree next to his own, he is able to recite to them a poem of Patti Smith’s, one that ends with pretty stars. Kerouac, whom he hates, mentions that stars are “‘the words,’ and all the innumerable worlds in the Milky Way are words, and so this is the world too.”

  Kerouac thinks that no matter where Rudy is, he will always be in his mind. There is no need for solitude. Rudy disagrees. Thoreau tells him, “This whole earth which we inhabit is but a point in space.… Why should I feel lonely? Is not our planet in the Milky Way?” Rudy thinks Thoreau is much tougher than Kerouac. Hemingway recommends Baudelaire, another man, but so does Wanda, someone he has almost forgotten he ever called a friend. He reads Les Fleurs du Mal, and stumbles upon, “Mainte fleur épanche à regret / Son parfum doux comme un secret / Dans les solitudes profondes.” Rudy thinks of Wanda again, and shrugs off the sensation that he is a star with a dangerous comet flying toward him.

  He is struggling to reach a sense of peace with the composition and decomposition of all things. He begins to wonder about the question of God because he has only ever encountered a work-harder, reward-later, punitive God. He sits and meditates, and waits for a new idea to challenge the part of himself calcified with punk cynicism and distrust of any form of power greater than the ones he can sense.

  Twice a week, every Monday and every Thursday, he picks up his cellphone and talks to Camelia. Camelia has been at his side for a long time. Rudy trusts his life to her dry, reasoning sense of humour, and he has placed her in his office while he is away. Most of the other people at Turner think he is fishing or with his family. Only Camelia knows that her boss is on a personal retreat. With the help of an elaborate series of codes Rudy has established with B.F., he begins the process of dismantling the Turner empire from within.

  Camelia need only type in numbers and names, so certain crooks are paid off and their obligation to Turner is finished. Rudy knows, almost universally, that the phone calls and the money represent an enormous relief to the various deal-making politicians and underworld agents he has been involved with—people who can now live free of the blackmail and personal coercion involved with his boss. They can now forget a man who bullied their every move. They can now forget all of it and get on with their crooked lives. He also drains the Turner empire by sending some of Turner’s loyal employees to other companies or, if they were extremely destructive, to early retirements, like an ownder swapping baseball players in big-league teams and then forgetting their names. Again, according to Camelia, the backlash was small. None were angry, and they were universally pleased at being sent to greener dollars.

  Rudy wishes Camelia well and tells her they will speak again next Monday. He reads Leaves of Grass. “What is grass? … / And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.” He writes another poem to himself, a haiku style, to complement his obsession with Satori:

  Slipping out from cover

  find in this pale place of blue

  the moon is rising.

  Rudy does not know what the rising moon represents, although he watches one from his tree every morning, but he hopes it is the influence he is playing over the housing hierarchies of the big cities where Turner Consolidated has always called the shots. The change in the urban sprawl is about to throw the high-rise housing market into convulsions. He is pleased with himself and spends the day throwing berries at small grey squirrels. The next day he writes:

  Break, hunter

  The incomprehensible you chase and chase

  Has itself raised her white tail and raced

  Towards a higher surrender.

  Rudy thinks the poem smacks of mortal playing God. He supposes that’s what a poet is: an observer in an uninvolved state. The more Rudy’s senses become aware of the cycles of death and birth around him, the more he feels an acute sense of other senses that have been dormant or asleep. He feels them there, but grasping at them is like grasping at air because he is certain that these other senses want to convey information to him about a state of natural order that he is not equipped to understand. There is no master; there is no friend or group of friends to ex
press his feelings to. There is only Rudy, the wind, and his little platform in the trees. He busies himself penning verses and finds them no less dangerous to his state of well-being than an injured deer is secure in the dark of a night forest.

  He reads Doris Lessing’s poems and thinks about reversing the destruction he has colluded in by faking a friendship with, and then taking away, Turner’s life. He pens in his book: “Striving to achieve what strange reversal,” a quote from Doris Lessing’s Briefing for a Descent into Hell.

  Strange, thinks Rudy, ignorant of his arrogance and with no master there to guide him. Strange, I thought I had just climbed out of hell, and am emerged.

  An uncomfortable nudging tells him a danger is approaching him, and there is nothing he can do.

  He closes his eyes, and he can hear the wind playing through the trees all around him, birds rattling the leaves, ravenous chicks calling to them in fights and flights of rapture. He picks up the cellphone and calls Camelia again, his trusty satellite dish transmitting the call to her desk.

  “On a Wednesday!” She is happy and surprised. Rudy needs to talk to someone anyway. He is spooked by his higher perceptions, and Camelia is a grounding force. She is wired on lattes and dressed in nylons and silk, and she is sitting behind a red oak desk with a dress pump swinging off her toe a thousand miles away. Rudy specifies the coordinates of six downtown sites in her city, which swift-minded Camelia notes are Turner properties. He wants her to buy as many of the condo units as she can and then strike a deal with the city so that low-income families can move in. “You realize that will devastate the ambience of our buildings. In all fairness Rudy, our original buyers will sell and move out….”

  Rudy pulls the scales free from a pine cone, tossing them spinning into the wind.

  “The more vacancies the better. I want all the units in those six sites filled with families earning less than twenty thousand a year within three to six. A minimum target.”