What We Are

by Peter Nathaniel Malae

  He says, “Anyway, at the start of year two, the balance of the loan jumps to one hundred fifteen thousand dollars.”

  “Okay.”

  “And the interest jumps to seven percent. On the whole hundred and fifteen.”

  “That’s a big jump.”

  “Yep. And you know what happens next?”

  “What?”

  “Some people can’t pay it.”

  “They fold?”

  “Of course.”

  “So why do the banks give out the money if they ain’t gonna get the money back?”

  “Let’s say you came at me and said, ‘You can have one of two situations with these no-interest loans. Either (a) you can make ten loans, in which case ten are paid back or (b) you can make a hundred loans, in which case ninety are paid back. Which do I take?”

  “The first.”

  “Wrong. I take the second.”

  “Don’t get it.”

  “It’s better to be big and fairly inefficient in this market than small and purely efficient. Or, rather, better to get bigger. Growth is the goal.”

  “Even if the growth is artificial?”

  “Those ten loans are paid back five times over by another ten loans over a five-year period. The bet is that the house of cards won’t fold because of its size. You assume the system can eat it, it being loss. The whole thing’s about the short term now. Or, rather, about the short-short-short term now. They’re pushing this thing to the limit. You know what’s gotta happen.”

  “Too much air in the balloon?”

  “A few soothsayers have said it’s gotta pop. And it will. Something’s gotta give. Let’s hope it’s confined to the valley and doesn’t hit the macro level: the NYSE, the Dow, and all the rest. Too many people around the world are relying on our word to be good. But you wanna know the worst part of this trend?”

  “Gets worse?”

  Another cigarette flicked, another lit. “I was one of the principal engineers of the idea.”

  I’m about to say, Yeah, Ms. Clannonite told me all about you, but don’t.

  “Monster real-estate mogul,” he says.

  “You’re all right, Uncle. Seen worse monsters at the Motel Six.”

  “That bucket of fleas?”

  “Yeah. This flea included.”

  “You won’t go back ever again.”

  “You never know. Even a big shot like you could find yourself in a place like that.”

  “No one wants to be there, nephew. Not even you.”

  “Wasn’t that bad. I had my own little jail cell to myself.” For some reason, the image of Chinaski on the stolen scooter whizzes through my head. “That was nice.”

  “Well, don’t sham yourself into thinking you’re living a life of decency because you don’t mind squalor and solitude.”

  “Okay, Uncle. You tell me then: Can I find truth in that cheap pitch to the bidding suckers: The door is open—”

  “—and the lights are on in the West. That’s right.”

  “What do you gain by seducing me to your ways?”

  “I never gain anything in business terms with you, nephew. I’ve everything to lose. Which is about as truthful as you can get. When I talk about the marginality of the real estate market and the fluff of these no-interest loans, I’m fingering me. And you.”

  “Indict yourself. I move desks and chairs for a living.”

  “Listen.”

  “Have been.”

  “Your weakness as a businessman is feeling bad for the loser in the deal. But someone always goes down for the sake of someone else coming up. That’s not only life, that’s capitalism. Profit couldn’t exist without loss. Conceptually impossible. And just the same, capitalism can’t exist without profit. It’s self-sustaining by the concept of wealth and poverty. You’ll never have one too many rich men out there that the system can’t sustain. Even when it cashes out like in ’twenty-nine, it was merely a cleaning of the slate. It was basically the United States’ turn to be a third world nation. Someone else out there was having for the sake of us not having. It doesn’t matter that there wasn’t much to have. What matters is that however much there was, we had less.”

  “Or not enough.”

  “Same difference. Because here’s what you and Mr. Marx can’t accept. Based strictly on the instinct of getting what you don’t have, the best businessmen out there are amoral.”

  “So Karl Marx was a moralist? Don’t think we disagree.”

  “Let me put it to you another way: the earning itself is the morality. Think about it. Everything else exists only because of and for the earning.”

  I’m a bit frustrated that my uncle has either (a) forgotten that I was making these very points at the lake during my dissertation on Tillman, (b) he took the unpatented argument so deeply to heart that he’s now unwittingly stealing it, or (c) consciously stealing it, or (d) he’s now merely flipping the point about, attaching it to his issue and using it against me. I’m not certain whether it’s better to be the originator of an idea or the last to use it. Or the loudest to use it. Or the oldest with supposedly more experience to use it.

  He says, “Are you with me?”

  “Yes,” I say, uninsulted. “Of course.”

  My uncle holds the cigarette out in front of me again and this time I take it, drag it deep into my lungs, blow the smoke right back in his face. We’ve stopped in front of an Afghan liquor store, two homeless cats sitting under the pay phone. I wish I had that Fuji apple now.

  My uncle says, “I can see you don’t believe me.”

  “Oh, not at all. I believe you, all right. I know you’re describing the true nature of business. And the justification is that you’re getting at the true nature of man.”

  “That’s wrong. I don’t need a justification. The whole world follows this paradigm.”

  “I know, Uncle. I ain’t all eyes and no sight.”

  “Then see this: I’m breaking it down as a mere courtesy to you.”

  “Well, thank you very much.”

  “And listen here.” I can see the two transients watching our exchange amusedly. “I’m gonna shut your elusiveness down for good.”

  “Gonna bear-trap me?”

  “You old enough to remember when Exxon came out with the that big environmental ad program back in the early nineties?”

  One of the transients digging his nose is smiling.

  “Well?” he presses. “Why did they do that?”

  “Um, pressure? Maybe lobbyists? A greener youthful generation making demands.”

  “Demands? Who the fuck cares about demands? It’s just talk. They don’t have to listen, and they won’t. I assure you that wasn’t the reason.”

  “Okay then, Uncle. What was it? You tell me.”

  “I will,” he says, blowing smoke right back in my face. “It was because lobbyists and that greener youthful generation were affecting their profit base. The talk only mattered when it affected the demand-supply curve. Those people were simply variables. If they were reps for the tobacco industry or the Tennessee Home Owners Association it would’ve been the same difference. If they were reps for your kindergarden’s sandbox. The question is this: Is our profit base affected?”

  “I get you, Uncle. Just take it easy.”

  My mind provides an image antithetical to the transients’ life: they sit quiet as aristocrats at a symphony.

  My stiff-arming of and high stepping over being pinioned to a permanent position truly pisses my uncle off. I don’t blame him. If I could get outside of myself like a twin Dostoevskian shadow, I’d probably join his cause and hurl stones at me. His eyes are saying, You think you’re worldly, punk? You ain’t shit. Sardonic yet affable interrogation only brings out the ugliness of his and what he’d hoped would be my profession. If he’s neck deep in this morally bankrupt business world for three decades at 40 to 70 hours a week, obviously that bankruptcy starts to invade the organism itself. It’s not a hostile takeover, no coup d’état. It’s a
n outsider moving into a room of your house one day and taking over, square foot by square foot. And then before you know it, you’re about to drunkenly defend the system you’ve so skillfully de-cried because the system is grotesquesly yourself.

  “I don’t care enough to see you get mad over it, Uncle.”

  “Well, then, let me tell you something else.”

  “It’s cool, man. Let it rest for a minute. Jeez.”

  “The only reason people started paying attention to the lobbyists and the greenists was because the Exxon Valdez went down off the shore of Alaska.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning that dead birds and dirty water are the same meaningless variables, one ripple removed. Come on, nephew! What the fuck are we talking about here? It doesn’t matter until it matters fiscally. All kinds of birds had died before that damned ship grounded. We’d had dirty water in this state for decades. What’s the matter, you don’t like what I’m saying?”

  “I guess I don’t.”

  “Well, don’t guess anything, because that’s the way it is. And you have no place in this world, goddammit, if you don’t cede this point.”

  “I agree with that view, anyway: I’ve no place.”

  One of the transients pipes up. “We’ve no place either!”

  My uncle pays him no attention. “It doesn’t matter if you do or don’t agree, get it? And guess what, big shot? You too are a variable on someone’s spreadsheet.”

  I look at the two transients, who must take great offense to the stupid academic conversation they’re hearing about what is in fact their lives. As if my uncle and I were authorities on the matter, jousting in an unpoppable bubble where we won’t have to fight for our words, for the air we breathe, for our lives. I want to walk on, at least respect their sordid little square on the sidewalk, respect their gone-bust story, but my uncle grabs my shoulders, holding me there.

  “What do you know anyway? Where do you plant your flag, nephew? What is your stance?”

  He tries to push me against the phone, but I twist my feet and, with better leverage beneath me, shove my uncle down the street, which he takes to, stumbling off. The two transients are standing now, riled out of their cloudy realities, mumbling curses and threats. I offer conciliatory words worth at least my uncle’s flight, but if I have to fight alone again in this frivolous city on the edge of America, I’ll know this go-round will be for no other cause than the hell of it.

  34

  We’re Coasting Down

  WE’RE COASTING down 85 blasting Brandenburg Concertos and not talking. Swerving a bit but it ain’t too bad. Or my uncle ain’t too bad. He came back with my car to get me at the liquor store, tossed the transients a fifty and no words of wisdom, which was kind of him, and now seems very focused, pushing the two-door Honda Civic to the limit. I’m writing a poem in the planner Tali bought me as a business talisman, each day filled up with a stanza.

  He floors the accelerator, I can hear the engine cry out like a dozen angry pigs about to be slaughtered—zeeeee!—and suddenly the weight of the car feels light in the wind of the highway. Like it could tip over at any moment. I feel alive, too, and then, as often happens, I don’t trust the feeling. Or I don’t trust the person in control. I use my leadership skills and turn down the radio.

  “Finito,” I say. “Wanna hear it?”

  “I’m not into the oral tradition.” I kick out Johann Sebastian and press in the slack-key slide of Gabby Pahinui, the old ki ho’alu master himself. He goes into his Hawaiian cowboy yodel and my uncle says, “Who the hell is this?”

  “Who cares? He makes good music and he’s happy.”

  My uncle picks up the CD case, scans the cover, says, “That’s ’cause he smokes more marijuana than the country of Jamaica. What the hell is he whining about?”

  I turn serious on him. “It’s called paka. And what are you whining about, losing fifty bucks to a homeless guy?”

  He doesn’t say anything.

  “You know,” I say, “he’s just gonna buy a forty with all that cash you kicked down.”

  I don’t know how he does it, but I can feel his disdain in the silence.

  “Well,” I add, “about fifty forties, anyway. Stockpile a makeshift bar of King Cobra behind a Dumpster.”

  I want to say to my uncle that if I were one of his true recruits of the streets I’d have knocked the both of them down and taken the shoes right off their feet. All in the name of SCREW. And then, I want to say to him, I would’ve knocked you down, too, Uncle, same treatment, no distinction, your generous nepotism aside. Or, I’d say, if they were smart free-market capitalists like you, they’d use the Ulysses Grant you gave ’em to buy some crystal meth, which they could then sell double or triple to some frat punks at Silicon University of the Valley. But just to really fuck with him, I’d like to say—in fact, officially announce—that it was a very nice pseudo-socialistic gesture on his part to give up fifty bucks for the cause and I’m proud of him.

  Instead I say, “But hopefully they’ll get a little food into ’em.”

  Still nothing.

  “So where we going, Uncle?” He doesn’t look over at me. I say with force, “Did you hear me?”

  “We’re gonna make a visit to the hens.” Still looking straight ahead.

  “What?”

  “The pheasantry.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “The Blue Pheasant.”

  The Blue Pheasant. I remember coming across the place in the Mercury News a few years back. Some poor lady got so badly raped in Cupertino that NOW came out in numbers and called for a citywide curfew in honor of the victim. There was a lot of chanting on television and calls from various women to reclaim the night. The cops traced the victim’s steps back to the Blue Pheasant. It turned out she was there with her swinging husband and they were recruiting players for the evening. The last anyone at the bar saw of her, she was leaving in the arms of two Afghan cats, her husband trailing behind, keys in hand. When the cops came, the wife was hysterical, hurling silverware at her husband. He’d been there through it all, hiding out in a locked closet. She picked the door with a hanger and stabbed him with it. So I remembered the strange name of the place because I more or less decided after reading the story never to go in it. But there was something bigger about the article that I can’t quite pinpoint. Not something sinister, really, but something laughably odd about the place, an eccentric frame to the story.

  I say, “You know about that big rape case?”

  “It’s all history, nephew. History.”

  I swallow at the thought of history, of yesterday vanishing in a sentence, reach out and blast the slack key so loud my uncle gasps, uncool, ugly.

  We trail off of the 85 and De Anza exit and make our way up Stevens Creek. We’re going away from the lights, away from civilization, toward the black hills. We pass houses and houses and more and more houses, and in the interlude of the white-lined road we await the next string of houses, which always appears. If I cared who sold them or who owns them, I’d ask my uncle, who’d know both answers.

  I don’t say a word.

  Finally the trees grow in density and width and it feels as if we’re going up an incline when—zeeeee! cries the engine—we descend a slope with an aerial view of the Blue Pheasant. At the bottom is a miniature canyon, phone wires of lights zigzagging across a lot. They hit the establishment at the roofline and run along the rim. Looks like the flashing grid of a computer chip. We can see it clearly, as could any passing plane, any airborne bird. I feel like I’m entering into the Tenth Circle of Hell, yet to have been invented during the good bard’s age of tricks and cuckoldry.

  I’m about to say, You ever seen Apocalypse Now? when I remember my uncle’s recent confession of cowardice at the hill. I’d like to say, This is like that scene where they pull up into that coastal village. You know, with the lights and firecrackers and explosives going off. Ten minutes later they’re done for. Too deep into the jungle. O
nce you’re in, you can’t get out.

  That’s what I want to say as we pull into the parking lot. But I don’t say a word. I watch, listen, look around. The marked and unmarked spaces are packed tightly with cars. Cadillac Sevilles, Oldsmobiles from the eighties, the kind with the spare tire on the trunk, pop-up outline, silver trim. Suddenly I remember: This place is for geezers. According to everything I’d heard, visitors to the Blue Pheasant were at, past, or well beyond a midlife crisis. The poor lady who’d gotten raped was a grandma of six.

  We pull to a stop at a platform of steps leading into the joint. Three gray-haired men, all balding badly, sixty and up, each with skin baked crimson, are on the stoop. The one in the middle has his sleeves rolled to his deltoids, the shirt wrapped around his torso like an Olympic swimsuit, ivory-white teeth. He slaps the shoulder of the man closer to him, lifts his red head like a beast of the Serengheti, and howls. He’s mocking my ride, this geezer who spends his idle afternoons in a tanning booth.

  “I’m not going in, nephew.”

  “Why?”

  “You wanted to ask me about your aunt, didn’t you?”

  “Well, yeah. I guess I did.”

  “Get out of the car and go see her then.”

  I don’t know what to do except look out the window at the three elderly fraternity brothers, and I don’t know what to say except, “What the fuck is wrong with us?”

  “This is it, nephew. I’m sorry.”

  “Not just us, you and me.” I look up at the Glory Days threesome. “But us.”

  “The end of the line, nephew. Hop out.”

  I slowly open the door and put a foot on the pavement, feeling this eerie inertia centered somewhere in my knotted guts, lining the winding road of my intestines. My tongue is paralyzed, a slug in the cave of my mouth. The earth has stopped revolving, or so I’d think. This is the time—right now—to say something of conviction, something worth my life, something human. Not for myself so much and not for my uncle’s sake, but for those of us in need of a lasting divinity, which is to say all of us, of something outside the empirical calibration of business, science, and tech, that heartless twenty-first-century trinity.