by Tom Wolfe
“… but such… a… sale I’ve never seen…”
“… who on earth needs four? But look in this shopping beg—go ahead, take a look in!…”
“… didn’t even use all my coupons…”
“… thirty minutes from now? You better forget about the lemon meringue…”
“… yeah, only one kesh register open and such… a… line you…”
“… ‘Attention shoppers,’ every two minutes ‘Attention shoppers’—gives me a migraine you wouldn’t believe!…”
“… pushy pushy pushy, the nerve of some people the way they push…”
“… don’t keh! Walgreens has better buys!…”
“… meringue eleven-fifteen, maybe you can get on line! Me, eleven-fifteen I gotta go up and take my pills…”
… All this to the accompaniment of music—of a beat, anyway—an irregular metallic beat, actually… clink clink… clatter clatter clatter… clink… clatter… clink clink clatter…
As Nestor and John drew closer, they could see the old ladies heading into the building, quite a few supporting themselves on aluminum walkers that clinked and clattered clattered and clink clink clinked… Only two old men… At least half of the old ladies, even the ones on the walkers, were carrying shopping bags… Walgreens… Walmart… CVS… Winn-Dixie… Marshalls… JCPenney… Chico’s… the Gap… Macy’s… Target… ShopRite… Banana Republic… Naturalizer…
Home! Back home bearing the kill they came! The élan of a party of deadeye hunters returning from the field was what they had.
“What’s all this meringue?” said Nestor.
“Beats me,” said John Smith. “We let them all go inside and get settled before we go in.”
Okaaaaay… “the reporter”… All day John Smith had been directing this operation. He had assumed the role of captain. Maybe on this terrain “the reporter” knew best… Nestor doubted it, but he was heavily dependent upon John Smith. What other ally did he have? All right… let him run this his way.
So they stood outside the building. John Smith motioned for him to take out the dosimeter. Nestor, already soaked with sweat though he was, had to admit John Smith was right… the suits… the machine… nobody was likely to identify them as a pair of shady young punks loitering around an active adults apartment building and up to no good. Two properly attired young men was what they were, two young gentlemen willing to wear all these clothes while the heat lamp in the sky was heading for the max… they must have a serious mission or they wouldn’t be here.
Once the way had cleared to John Smith’s satisfaction, it was a minute or so after 11:30. The big front entrance was not an entrance in any formal architectural sense. It was nothing but a ten-foot-high, thirty-foot-long corridor where two sides of the building joined.
Thank God… no concierge desk or anything else to check who was going in or out. John Smith and Nestor walked right on in and found themselves standing on the edge of a courtyard framed by four sides of the building coming together to create a square. Like the exterior, the courtyard of the Alhambra Lakes was the fried remains of what must have been a full gardenscape of palm trees, shrubbery, and flowers once upon a time… and at dead center, a square pool with a worn-out fountain that feebly projected a single, spent spout of water up to about three feet above the surface of the pool. On the second and third floors wide slabs of concrete projected from the interior walls all the way around the square, creating a walkway, an outsized catwalk, as it were, and a back porch for every apartment on the floor. An open stairway connected all three levels in case you didn’t want to take the elevator they had passed on the way in.
“We’ll take the elevator up to the top,” said John Smith, describing a great loop in the air with his forefinger, “and work our way down to the second floor and then down here to the courtyard, okay?”
They had the elevator to themselves on the way up. At the top, the third floor, they stepped out onto the walkway… and into a loud, noxious mechanical noise. On the far side a brown-skinned maintenance man in coveralls was cleaning the catwalk with an industrial vacuum cleaner. From somewhere below came the clinking clacking tintinnabulation of a couple of aluminum walkers. Nearby… the too-loud yawps of TV sets within the apartments… but no tenants were out in the noonday sun on this floor. John Smith went slowly past the apartments on this side, and Nestor followed, holding the “sonar audiometric monitor”… ::::::What am I—a native bearer?:::::: Somewhere within an apartment a television show was turned on so loud, you could hear every word… “But he’s been her gastroenterologist for five years!” says the unmistakably soapopera voice of a young woman. “And now he falls in love with her?—while spreading her cheeks for a colonoscopy? Oh, men”—she begins loading every word with sobs—“Men—men—mennn-uh-uh-uh-uh—they lead an entirely separate life below the beh-eh-he-ehlt!” Beside the door, on the floor of the catwalk, was a cast-iron frog, painted light green. It was only about a foot high, but it was also about a foot wide and fifteen inches long… which made it look enormous and heavy. On either side of the door was a small window. John Smith and Nestor made a point of not being nosy and looking in. The next apartment was identical, except that the program bellowing inside for all it was worth was some comedy show with the most annoying laugh track Nestor had ever heard… and beside the door was a two-foot-high cast-iron caveman with arms and shoulders like a gorilla’s. It looked heavier than the frog. At the next apartment… God almighty!… a what?—Discovery Channel show?—a bunch of lions roaring, not just one but what did they call them?—a “pride”? Must be turned up to the max, because between the lions and the industrial vacuum cleaner Nestor felt like the noise out here in this active adults pile of bricks had him paralyzed… Beside this door, a big pot of red geraniums, a regular mass of red geraniums… that turned out to be fakes.
John Smith had to get close to Nestor to make himself heard. “Keep an eye on those… things by the doors, whatever they are”—he pointed toward the flowerpot—“for something that says ‘artist,’ okay?”
Nestor nodded. He was already fed up with taking orders from John Smith. Who did he think he had become all of a sudden, the great detective?
They checked out two more apartments. Same thing… John Smith came up close to Nestor again and said, “I’ve never heard TV sets on that loud. What are they—deaf?”
“They’re on aluminum walkers, for God’s sake,” said Nestor. “If they’re not deaf, who is?” He didn’t say it with a smile. He could tell John Smith had no idea at all where the overtone of reproof had come from. So then Nestor felt guilty.
It was so loud out here on this catwalk that neither Nestor nor John Smith realized that two figures were coming up behind them until they were almost upon them… two old ladies. One seemed terribly small. Her back was humped so far over her walker, her eyes were at about the level of Nestor’s rib cage… and so rheumy, they constantly leaked tears. Her remaining hair had been dyed blond and teased up into little puffs of spun cilia meant to give the impression of thick hair, but Nestor could see right through them to the skin of her skull. All at once he felt consumed by pity and a rogue desire to protect her. The other old lady stood upright with the help of a cane. Her hair was white and thinning so badly that the part on one side looked more like a bald spot. But she had retained a lot of extra pounds and had a big round face… and she wasn’t shy. She walked right up to John Smith and said, “Can I help you? You looking for something, maybe?”
The way she said it—she was a formidable presence. John Smith uttered some garbled name… “Gunnar Gerter”?… and… gestured toward Nestor and said, “This is my technician, Mr. Carbonell.”
::::::my technician::::::
“We’re taking noise-level readings,” said John Smith… He gestured toward the dosimeter Nestor was holding ::::::like a flunky::::::
“Hahhh!” She let out a sardonic laugh. “At this place? Noise? More noise I’d like to hear. You know what you have to b
e to make noise? Alive.”
John Smith smiled. “I don’t know about that. We’re getting some pretty high readings right here.” Now he gestured toward the industrial vacuum cleaner and then toward the apartment they stood in front of. TV game show cheers shrieked from within. Before the woman could get onto such questions as Why? Who sent you? From where? John Smith said, “By the way, perhaps you can tell me something. We’ve been admiring your little statues by the doors. You have some artist here who does them?”
“Hughhhh”—a disdainful chortle from the little old lady bent over her walker. She had a shrill and surprisingly strong voice—“Artists? We got one artist here, or that’s what he calls himself. Me, I never saw anything he ever did. Mainly he stinks the place up. The smell coming from his apartment is terrible, terrible. Are you from the Environment?”
The environment? Nestor couldn’t imagine what she meant, but John Smith didn’t skip a beat. “Yes, we are.”
The stout woman with the cane said, “Oh, finally already somebody comes! You could die from this stink. We been complaining about this guy for three months. We complain and complain and nobody comes. We leave messages, and nobody calls. Whatta you people got there for the messages, an answering machine or one a those trash bags, the plastic ones, the color of what I’m not gonna say.”
The little old lady on the walker interrupted. “Come on, Lil. We gotta get to the dining room—to the meringy.”
“Meringy? It’s not meringy, Edith. Meringy is some kind a dance. It’s merang, lemon meringue.”
“I know, I know, but if we don’t get there, it’ll be gone, and today’s the only day they have it.”
“Edith… and today’s the only day the Environment comes here. Besides, sometimes there’s some left. Dahlia can save us some. She puts them in her bag.”
“Hughhhh! You hear that?” said the stout woman. She pointed down toward the lower floors.
Sure enough, you could hear a rising percussion concert of clink clatterclatter clink clink clatter, even louder than the one Nestor and John Smith had heard coming out of the Shop ’n’ Browse Buy Bus. A lot of people on aluminum walkers were trying to get somewhere fast.
“And that don’t even count the people,” said Edith, “the people who go down there and line up a half hour before the dining room opens on meringy day is what Hannah and Mr. Cutter do.”
The stout one, Lil, didn’t even bother correcting the meringy. She was busy talking to John Smith. “There is such… a… stink in this place; you can even smell it right here. Do you smell it?… Smell! Smell! Take a good smell!”
She was so bossy, Nestor inhaled and took a good smell. He didn’t smell anything unusual. Edith, the smaller one, said: “My doctor says it’s toxic… toxic… Look it up, toxic. It’s the reason I don’t eat right, I don’t sleep. The doctor is doubling my doses of fish oil every week. Even my hair stinks from the smell going around everywhere.”
“Where is this apartment?” said John Smith.
“Right under my apartment,” said Lil, pointing down the row of doors on the catwalk. “Such… a… stink comes up, no matter what I do.”
“Me, too,” said Edith, “but Lil’s is worse.”
John Smith said to Lil, “Have you ever tried talking to him about it?”
“Tried? I’ve camped outside his door. Talk about a smell! You could smell the stink coming out of his door. Neighborly he’s not. I’ve seen him, but I never seen him go in or come out. He must do it in the dark. I’ve never seen him in the dining room. I hear him down in his apartment. But nobody knows his phone number or his e-mail. I go down and I ring his bell, I knock on his door, and he don’t answer. I send him a letter, and he don’t write back. So I call you people, and you don’t do bupkis. And it’s not just me and Edith. Everybody on his floor has to breathe that stink. It’s like poison gas or nuclear radiation. It’s a good thing nobody here’s having children anymore. They’d be born with one arm or no nose or a tongue that don’t reach the front teeth or with their bowels up in their chests and they’ll do everything out their ears and talk with their belly buttons and think outta brains located in what they sit down on. Close your eyes and see it. You try it. You try talking to him.”
John Smith and Nestor looked at each other… nonplussed. Then John Smith managed a smile and said, “I don’t even know his name.”
“His name is Nicolai,” said Lil. “His last name starts with K but after that it’s all v’s and k’s and y’s and z’s. A collision at an intersection they sound like they had.”
John Smith and Nestor looked at each other. They didn’t need to say it out loud. “Nicolai? Not Igor?”
“Do me a favor,” John Smith said. “Take us there, to his apartment, so we’ll know exactly which one.”
“Hahhh—a guide you don’t need!” piped up Edith. “You got maybe a nose?”
“Edith’s right,” said Lil. “But I’ll take you there anyway. Too long already we been waiting for somebody from the Environment.”
So all four, including clink clatter clatter clink Edith with her walker, got on the elevator, and Lil led them to “Nicolai’s” door on the second level’s catwalk. Beside the door was a two-foot-high metal statue of a tall man extending his right arm, palm-down, in a salute.
John Smith leaned toward Nestor and said, “That’s Chairman Mao, except that Chairman Mao was more like five-two. Right there he’s six-five. Igor is… weird.”
::::::How does he know these things?::::::
The smell—it was strong, all right… but not unpleasant, if you asked Nestor. It was turpentine. He had always liked the smell of turpentine… but maybe if you had to live next door on this catwalk and smell somebody else’s turpentine fumes day and night, you might get fume-whipped pretty fast.
John Smith walked past six or seven doors on the catwalk this way… and six or seven that way… and returned to “Nicolai’s” apartment.
“Yeah, it’s pretty strong everywhere,” said John Smith. He looked at Lil. “We have to get inside there and find out exactly what the source is before we can do anything. How can we get in? Any ideas?”
“The manager’s got a key to every apartment.”
“Where’s the manager?”
“Hahhhh!” said Edith. “The manager’s never here!”
“Where is he?” said John Smith.
“Hahhhh! Who knows? So Phyllis fills in and covers for him. She says she likes it. Phyllis Easy to Please is what I call her.”
“Who’s Phyllis?”
“She’s a tenant,” said Lil.
“A tenant fills in for the manager?”
Lil said, “A manager here’s like a super—a superintendent—in New York. A janitor with a title is what the manager is.”
Nestor spoke up for the first time. “You’re from New York?”
Edith, not Lil, answered the question. “Hahhh! Everybody here is from New York, or Long Island—the whole town moved down here. Who do you think lives in these places, people from Florida, maybe?”
“So does Phyllis have the key?”
“If anybody’s got the key,” said Lil, “Phyllis got the key. Want me to call her?” She took out her cell phone.
“By all means!” said John Smith.
“Nicolai—she don’t think he’s fifty-five in the first place. Phyllis don’t,” said Edith. “It ends up, he’s got to go to the office sometimes. Phyllis knows what he looks like. He’s got a big mustache goes out like this, but I haven’t seen him in a long time. You got to be fifty-five and no pets and no children to buy a condo.”
Lil had already turned her back for privacy. The one thing Nestor heard her say clearly was “You sitting down? You ready for this?… The Environment’s here.”
Lil turned toward them, closing her cell phone. She said to John, “She’s coming up! She can’t believe the Environment’s here, either.”
In no time a tall, bony old woman—Phyllis—arrived. She looked at John Smith and Nestor with a
long face. Lil introduced her to them. Thank God, Lil remembered Nestor’s new last name, “Carbonell,” because he had already forgotten it. Phyllis’s scowl changed from a scowl to a smile of withering scorn.
“Took you only three months to get here,” she said. “But maybe that’s what you Government people call ‘rapid response.’ ”
John Smith closed his eyes, spread his lips into a flat grimace, and began nodding his head in the yes mode conveying the notion Yes, yes, it hurts, but I have to admit I know exactly what you mean. Then he opened his eyes and gave her a profoundly sincere look and said, “But when we do get here, we… are… here. Know what I’m saying?”
Nestor winced and said to himself, ::::::I don’t believe this.:::::: Now he understood what it took to be a newspaper reporter: double-talk and heartfelt lies.
It must have mildly reassured stone-faced Phyllis, however, for she shot them both looks of merely mild disdain and produced a key and unlocked the apartment door.
It opened into a kitchen, a small filthy kitchen. About a week’s worth of dishes and tinny-looking knives and forks and spoons with the remains not even scraped off had been stacked up helter-skelter in the sink. About a week’s worth of unidentifiable spots, gobs, and spills were all over the counters on either side of the basin and on the floor. About a week’s worth of garbage, fortunately desiccated by now, lay crammed into a tinny trash canister to the point where it kept the lid from closing. The place was so filthy, the pervasive smell of turpentine struck Nestor as a purifier.
Phyllis led them from the kitchen into what was no doubt designed to be a living room. Right in front of the sliding glass doors on the far wall was a big, dark, ancient-looking wooden easel. Next to it was a long industrial worktable with a stack of metal drawers at each end. The top was cluttered with tubes, rags, and God knows what else, plus a row of coffee cans with the long slender handles of paintbrushes sticking out. The easel and the table rested upon a piece of paint-spattered tarpaulin at least seven feet by seven feet. That was the only floor covering in the room. The rest was bare wood… that hadn’t been attended to in a long time. The place looked halfway studio and halfway storeroom, thanks to the boxes and pieces of equipment piled in no discernable order against one of the side walls—rolls of canvas… big boxes, long, wide, but only three or four inches deep… Nestor guessed they were for framed pictures… a slide projector on top of a small metal stand about three and a half feet high… a dehumidifier… and more boxes and cans…