The Sergeant looks around frantically to see which building is going to fall on him. Edwin calmly flicks a piece of pavement from his well-tailored pant leg. “You see?” Edwin asks the Sergeant. The Sergeant nods in mute agreement, all the while wondering if they have a gun big enough to stop this guy. After pondering this for a minute, the Sergeant says, “Jesus.”
Topper leaps down from the door of the trailer. He is high on life, destruction and several other substances. “Ah HELL YEAH!” He shrieks, “That’s it. Get mad. Get mad at it. It’s showtime.”
Barry picks himself off the ground. Topper stands right in front of him and holds his open palm as high in the air as he can manage. “C’mon. You’re a monster. You’re an animal. WHOOOOOOO-ugh.” Topper’s high spirited rant is cut short when Barry high-fives the little man and sends him rolling across the pavement. Topper comes to rest at Edwin’s feet. He looks up and says, “We gotta get this kid in a boxing ring.”
“Only if you can get him to throw the fight,” says Edwin, “Otherwise we’ll get no odds.”
The Sergeant looks at Barry. Then he looks at Topper. Then back to Barry. Then at Edwin. It makes him seem less a person and more like some kind of spastic, over-caffeinated pigeon. When he realizes that both Edwin and Topper are staring him he says, “Are, are, are you sure you can control that thing?”
“Him, he’s a pussy cat,” says Topper, rubbing a spot on his head where it slammed against the pavement. “Hey, dumbass, get over here.” Barry smiles and lumbers towards Topper. The Sergeant flinches again. He thinks about calling for a S.W.A.T. team, just in case. But then he realizes that if this went wrong, there’s probably nothing a S.W.A.T team could do. It would be out of his hands and nobody could blame him.
“Come on dumbass, let’s go mess up this building. Then we’ll go get a double helping of pie.”
“PUH-EYE!,” bellows Barry.
“Yeah, yeah, pie. I know you like pie!” And with that Topper goes into a fit of verbal and physical gymnastics. He simultaneously curses and praises Barry. He moves quickly and erratically and incessantly, like the end of a piece of string dangled in front of a cat. All of this serves to keep Barry’s attention. In this frantic manner Topper moves Barry towards the doomed structure one gesticulation at a time.
Edwin can not imagine how this communication is possible. It is as if Topper has a gift. The kind of a gift attributed to horse whisperers and snake charmers and wild-eyed mystics who spend most of their time in the dry, empty places of the world. There is only one way to say it. On some, animalistic level, Topper and Barry have a connection.
As Barry nears the building, he becomes distracted. He looks down and sees two tiny flowers that have managed, against all odds and logic, to claw their way through a crack in the sidewalk. Their existence is impossible, but, as so often happens with nature, no one has bothered to tell the flowers. It is enough to move a person with even the slightest amount of imagination to tears. One could see the flowers as a metaphor for beauty’s eternal struggle to prevail in harshest of conditions. Or as an example of how the gentler emotions can take root in even the rockiest and most uninspired of places. One could, but not Barry.
“Pretty,” he says as lumbers to a stop. And there Barry, vicious brute with forehead villainous low, stoops to adore two tiny yellow flowers.
“Hey. Hey! HEY!” Topper stomps over to the flowers. “What is this? Flowers? What are you, some kind of sissy boy? Stopping to pick flowers? C’mon, we got buildings to mess up.”
When Barry doesn’t even look up. Topper gets mad. He slaps Barry across the top of his head. “C’mon, dumbass, leave the flowers alone.” Barry still doesn’t look up. With uncharacteristic gentleness, he caresses the petals with one sausage-like finger.
“Pretty,” said Barry.
“Well piss in a parasol! If you like the flowers so much we’ll take them with us.” Topper reaches down to rip the flowers out of the earth, but he doesn’t quite make it. Barry drops one of his meathooks on Topper’s head. Topper is compressed into the ground. As the air escapes from his lungs he says, “Awk.”
Barry lifts Topper off the ground. Legs flailing wildly Topper commands, “Put me down. Put me down DUMBASS.”
“Flowers pretty,” says Barry. Then he tosses Topper over his shoulder. Once again Topper tumbles across pavement and lands at Edwin’s feet.
“E, I don’t like this job anymore,” says Topper.
“I’m not sure I can care about that Topper,” says Edwin, not taking his eyes off Barry.
“He squeezed my little brain,” says Topper.
What an apt turn of phrase, thinks Edwin. “I am sorry Topper, but we have a schedule to keep and a building to destroy.”
“Oh yeah, well I’d like to see you do better. Beanpole!” Edwin ignores the strange insult. Clearly Plan A is not working. Edwin is never without a Plan B. But Plan B and C and all the other secondary plans are always messier, riskier and less profitable than Plan A. So Edwin does something remarkable. He lets go of all his plans.
He quiets his thoughts and simply observes. He sees the building. He sees Barry. From the corner of his eye, he can see the Sergeant. He can perceive the Sergeant’s indecision. Edwin can feel the situation becoming untenable. The moment has developed its own urgency. Something must be done.
Edwin pushes passed this noise. He allows himself a greater calm. He uses his will to clear his mind. And at the bottom of it all. Past all the worries and the factors and schemes and the judgements is a breath of air that ruffles tiny flower petals.
The idea arrives fully formed. As if it has a will of its own. It is not completely accurate to say that the idea had Edwin, but that’s the way it feels. Endorphins rush through Edwin’s brain, confirming the joy of this Eureka moment.
“Ed, are you okay?” asks Topper.
Edwin walks. He brushes by Barry, who is still hunched over his flowers. Edwin approaches the Spackster building as any penitent might approach any temple of commerce on any day. The entrance is boarded and covered in graffiti. The remnants of a revolving door litter the sidewalk. But Edwin is not interested in the inside of the building. He is interested, for once, in the facade of things. And there, among the dirty stones, he finds what he needs.
A brick tumbles and grinds across the sidewalk. Before it comes to a rest, it shears the tiny flowers off at their base. Barry jerks his head up in outrage. And there stands Edwin pointing at the building as if, somehow, the building has just spat the brick on Barry’s precious flowers.
Barry doesn’t think much. Barry doesn’t think often. And it goes without saying that Barry doesn’t think very well. So when he sees that the little flowers have been crushed by a dingy yellow brick, and that there is large pile of dingy yellow bricks right in front of him, it’s not hard for him to put two and two together and come up with – well, not four, exactly, but a really, really big two. Which isn’t the right answer, but for Barry, it’s close enough. He comes up swinging.
‘MAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRGAHHHHHH!”
Fist hits bricks. Bricks lose. In fact, the bricks of the Spackster building lose so badly that they can’t even qualify as bricks anymore. They are demoted to hot and highly confused dust so fast that the effect is indistinguishable from an explosion. Pieces of building whiz by Topper’s head at a frightening velocity. Everybody runs. Even Edwin puts on an uncharacteristic hurry.
WABOOOOM! The west wall of the Spackster building gives way. Barry is buried in bricks and debris up to his neck. From his vantage point on the top of a police car, Topper can see Barry’s head moving through the rubble like a periscope. Barry wades in deeper and takes out another support pillar. The earth shudders as another section of the building comes tumbling down. “YEAH! YEAH! YEAH! WRECK THE JOINT!” Topper yells.
Topper’s high voice carries through the noise of destruction. It is just the right pitch to be heard over the scrape of thousands of bricks upon thousand of other bricks, the tinkle of broken g
lass, and the basso profundo bellowing of Barry himself. Topper’s voice reaches the spectators. The ordinary folk of the city, who are sneaking a few moments from their lives with the expectation of seeing an implosion. They were expecting a quick orgasm of violence. But this is something different. This is something much better. The kind of thing many members of the crowd might order on Pay-Per-View. This is an orgy of destruction.
Topper’s cry infects the crowd. Now thousands of people join in, “WRECK THE JOINT! WRECK THE JOINT!” as if the demolition is some kind of perverse sporting event. Topper feels the wall of noise pressing him forward before he understands what the crowd is saying. He turns and plays cheerleader.
Edwin does not take his eyes off Barry. Edwin now has a fear. It is too late to do anything about it. Another section of the building crashes down sending up a tremendous wall of dust. Edwin covers his face with an immaculate handkerchief. Unable to see, the crowd falls silent.
“Aw c’mon,” Topper shouts, “It was just getting GOOD!”
“Topper,” says Edwin.
“Yeah,” replies Topper, looking down on his friend from the top of a police car.
“I have a question.” Before Edwin can give voice to his fear, he is interrupted by a deafening sound. It’s a sound that one might describe as an impossibly large chandelier falling from its anchor point on the moon. But Edwin is far too practical of a man to make this mistake. He knows what the sound really is. He puts a hand to his brow and bows his head.
As the dust parts the crowd erupts in a roar. There is Barry, laying into one of the newer, sleeker, tremendously more valuable buildings.
“WRECK THE JOINT! WRECK THE JOINT!” Topper screams as he smashes the blue lights on top of the police car.
“Topper please,” Edwin says, not looking up.
“C’mon E. You gotta see this. This is awesome!”
Edwin watches Barry tip Lemahi Center Tower #3 into Lemahi Center Tower #4. Both buildings come raining down in an avalanche of shattered glass and twisted metal.
“HORAGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG!,” yells Barry as he destroys millions of dollars worth of real estate.
Topper says, “I know those are the wrong buildings, but you gotta admit, the kid’s got talent.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
A Blackjack Toting Angel
“You moron! You incompetent! You, you, you complete toothless GOOB! I am going to break you. I’m going to break you and then I am going to have you ground up into little pieces, brewed into tea, drink you down and piss you out onto your own grave.”
Edwin turns his face and catches a fleck of spittle on his cheek. It is not often that Edwin gets yelled at. The novelty wears off quickly. As Mr. Lamahi continues to vent his spleen, Edwin wipes the spittle from his face with a handkerchief.
Intellectually, Edwin is aware of the idea of sympathy. He can understand that Mr. Lemahi has poured all of his hard work and dreams of real estate success into this project. A project that had just been destroyed by the drooling, ham-fisted man-child that is Barry. He can understand that Mr. Lemahi is upset. He just doesn’t care. Besides, all of this yelling is giving him a headache.
Edwin tries to calm Mr. Lemahi. “It’s not a total loss is it? You have insurance. Acts of God and such.”
“Damn it! There’s not an insurance company on Earth that will cover what happened. Acts of Superpersons are not Acts of God. That goddamned clause just killed me! No, NO. You just killed me!”
“Please Mr. Lemahi, for your own good, you need to calm down. Perhaps some tea?”
“Calm myself! Are you threatening me!?! Are you THREATENING ME?”
“No, I am offering you tea. I—”
“No, shut up. You don’t get to talk Windsor. You screwed it up. There’s no other way to say it. So SHUT UP. Only I get to talk.”
Edwin activates the intercom. “Agnes, we are in need of tea and scones.”
The angry man doesn’t stop talking. “25 years of my life poured into that project and 55 million in escrow isn’t going to cover it. C’mon, c’mon say something. I want to hear what you have to say for yourself.”
“I—”
“SHUT UP! I’m not through yelling at you yet.”
Edwin pushes his chair back from his desk, crosses his legs and cups his chin in the palm of his hand. Truly, Mr. Lemahi is turning out to be a barren form of amusement. In the background Agnes shuffles in with a carefully prepared tray. “Would you care for tea, Mr. Lemahi?”
“Tea? TEA! Aren’t you people listening? The only tea I want is made from his ground up BONES!”
“I’m afraid all I have is Darjeeling,” says Agnes.
“Well you can take your Darjeeling and shove it up your dusty old — !”
From behind the teapot, Agnes produces a stun gun. Before Lemahi can finish his foul sentence, she gets him right in the neck. Lemahi goes from outrage to shock to a kind of vibrating fish face. His eyeballs roll back into his head and he slides out of the chair like a sack of meat. Which, given the trauma his nervous system has just endured is pretty much what he is.
“Thank you Agnes,” says Edwin.
Agnes holds up the stun gun as an object of contemplation. “Call me old-fashioned, but I prefer a blackjack.”
“As much as I respect you and your unique mix of talents, Agnes, it is an unavoidable fact that your strength is waning as you grow older.”
“Oh posh. Strength? It’s all technique. One should not blame the brush for the shortcomings of the artist.”
“Mnnnnngah,” says Lemahi as he struggles to regain a handle on the moment. He drags himself to a knee.
“You see? You see?” cries Agnes. “It is a shoddy product that does not work as advertised!” She zaps him again with the Taser. Lemahi rag-dolls to the floor. Edwin find neither comedy nor tragedy in this. He watches the entire spectacle without emotion.
Now a normal person, say a man on his way to buy a hotdog for lunch, would have been rendered unconscious by two blasts in the neck from a stun gun. But Lemahi is fueled by truly righteous and exceptional anger. And he is not to be denied. One hand claws at the side of the chair as he struggles to get his badly jangled nervous system to fire in some kind of coherent order. As he rises, red-faced and sputtering, Agnes says, “Oh good Lord!” and bustles out of the room.
Edwin is left alone with a crippled and angry man. “Windsssssssssir!,” Lemahi slurs, hacking at his words like a stroke victim. “Urrrrrn ann idiot. An an an an an an”
THOCK!
It is, Edwin thinks, an odd sort of sound. He looks up from his desk to see how it has been produced. There is Agnes, standing over the now definitively unconscious Lemahi. In her hand is a piece of lead wrapped in leather.
“There,” says Agnes as if she has just set a quaint sea-side cottage to rights, “I feel better, don’t you?”
Edwin does not feel better. He stares off into a point where the wall meets the ceiling.
“Edwin dearie, what is it?” Agnes asks. The battle axe of moments before has melted away into an angel of compassion. A blackjack toting angel, but an angel all the same.
“He is right,” says Edwin.
“He is no such thing. He is rude and ignorant.”
“But Agnes, don’t you see? I know— I should have known better. To expect an irrational creature to act rationally…” Edwin trails off and Agnes lets the silence be. She pours Edwin a cup of the Darjeeling and quietly sets it on the desk beside him.
Edwin doesn’t even look at it. Agnes says, “You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself.”
Edwin does not respond. After a while, Agnes leaves the room to arrange for the removal of Mr. Lemahi. As the cup of tea cools, Edwin sinks deeper and deeper into depression. And this funk is a malaise of why. Why had Edwin chosen to put himself in this position? It would have required little enough imagination to figure out what might go wrong — and this most recent setback notwithstanding — was his entire conception flawed?
Could he t
ruly expect the unrestrained and foolish to act rationally? Could he correct the flaws of a villainous world? Or was it destined to be that reason and logic would have little place under the sun? Edwin knows his logic is sound, that his ideas are good. But is the weakness and fallibility of men such that he can never succeed?
Days come and go. Edwin comes to work. Edwin goes home. He takes no calls and he holds no meetings. He sits in his office, staring into space, as the sun moves across the sky. Seeking his answer in the movement of shadows.
After long years of service, Agnes is highly attuned to Edwin’s moods. At times she has felt his great brain churning on some problem as one might feel the thundering of a diesel engine buried beneath the deck plates of a ship. But now she can sense nothing. When she tries to talk with him, he dismisses her with an all-too-familiar wave of his hand. He has gone where she cannot follow. But she does not give up. She does the only thing she can think to do. She calls Topper.
Chapter Thirty
Topper Gives a Pep Talk
Topper is not the kind of person who broods. Sure, he’ll cry at the drop of a hat. Sure he’ll rage and throw a fit for no reason at all. He will whipsaw back and forth across of a range of emotions so extreme that it could give an ordinary person the bends. But Topper never broods. The finer shades of a long, protracted ennui are unknown to him. As is the word ennui.
So when Topper hangs up the phone after talking with Agnes, his reaction is swift. “Bullshit,” says Topper, “It’s just nothing but bullshit.”
The way Topper sees it, there is no reason to get stuck in a mood. The seasons change, the temperature changes, everything in the world changes. And if you fight it too much, you just screw yourself up. A man has to follow his urges. They come in on a radio from God. And you might not always understand them, but maybe you weren’t supposed to.
How To Succeed in Evil Page 14