by Owen King
In another person, this behavior might have worried Sam. From a hygiene standpoint, it was certainly short of ideal, but it wasn’t a manifestation of agoraphobia, at least not as Sam understood the condition. It wasn’t that Wesley was afraid of the outdoors; it was that everything he needed to maintain his happiness was either in his computer, on the television, or available for order.
Wesley’s mother, Mrs. Latsch—who drove up from Maryland a couple of times a year to visit, assisting Wesley in his biannual trip to the Laundromat and replenishing his supply of vitamins—once related to Sam that, even as a toddler, Wesley was flabbergasted by all the effort expended around him. “I remember we saw a man running across a street, trying to catch a bus, and Wesley asked me why the man was in such a hurry. I said, ‘He needs to get to work, sweetheart.’ Wesley, he must have been about five, he just shook his head and said, ‘Can you imagine?’ ” At this, Mrs. Latsch poured out a delighted chuckle. She just knew, she said, that her boy was conserving his resources for something important.
Sam had his doubts. He didn’t believe Wesley planned much beyond his next appointment with the bottle of lemon verbena lotion in the bathroom. “What’s up with the Weather Channel? Jesus, Wesley, you’re not thinking of going outside, are you?”
His roommate said the Weather Channel was Mina’s choice. “And don’t think I didn’t detect that note of condescension in your voice.” Wesley sighed. “You can be very hurtful sometimes, Sam Dolan.”
“The guide said there was going to be a special on natural disasters, but it was a lie,” said Mina. “It’s been nothing but regular weather so far.”
“Mina has been fretting about climate change. She wants her children, and her children’s children, not to be drowned by the rising oceans or cancered by the sun’s ultraviolet rays,” said Wesley.
“Har-har, Wesley the Hutt. What fat roll did you pull ‘cancered’ out of, anyway?”
“We’re on the same side, Mina.” Wesley typed something into his computer. “I’m as eager to watch tornado and earthquake footage as you are.”
Sam finally reached the kitchenette, shoving aside a knee-high pallet of eco-themed surface wipes to breach the entryway. He opened the refrigerator and helped himself to a bottle of the Rip Van Winkle white ale that the Swag Hag said tasted like the lice of unloved children. Sam thought it tasted like sour cherries.
Mina had finished searching through the list. “Number thirty-four is ‘Never pry into the affairs of strangers.’ Strangers. You’re not a stranger, Sam. Guess it’s safe for Wesley the Hut to dig into your sad, bitter life as much as he wants.”
She kicked up her spindly legs and clicked the toes of her shiny boots. His sister was at once gamine and bleak, like a fallen elf. How many teenage boys would Sam have to visit with his trusty DVD before Mina safely reached the age of consent? However many it took, but the signs were ominous.
Sam retraced his journey through the scree until he reached the tube-sock-bag pyramid. Here, he took a sharp left into different territory, scraping through the narrow channel between two massive crates to arrive at the television area. He pushed a box off the seat of the uncomfortable armchair angled to the other side of the couch, and sat.
“So, did you have a good, solid pity party at the movie or what?” asked Wesley.
“No, I had a beer at the movie and observed some mouth-breathers in their natural habitat. That was it. Earlier on, though, I did nearly pass out over a poem.”
Mina stopped clicking her toes. “Really?”
“Uh-huh.”
Sam wasn’t sure why he mentioned it. Sympathy didn’t mean a whole lot to him as a rule, and if it did, he wouldn’t want any from his younger sister. He supposed the confession didn’t matter one way or another. They would do what they wanted and make of it what they wanted. Even the people you knew best, you knew just well enough to doubt, to understand that there were warrens of self that went beyond understanding, yours and theirs both.
The thought occurred to him that if he ever met Tess again and shared these reflections, she would be justified in mocking him. “We could have been having sex,” she could have said, “and instead, you scurry off to go and brood weakly about the existential limits of your relationship with your sister and the disgusting person you live with? Sam. Come on.”
There was gloom, and there was fucking, and if you could be fucking and gloomy instead, that was greedy and sick and you deserved whatever stomachache you got. He had a stomachache, all right.
Sam wished he’d handled the situation with Tess better. He wished he had kept his cool outside the bar. The poet had not drowned in the turd water—there was that, at least.
“What about it made you almost pass out? About the poem.”
“ ‘The ruthless furnace of this world.’ ” Sam pulled from the bottle and smacked his lips. “That’s all I’ve got. Just that line.”
“I don’t get it,” said Mina.
His roommate paused in his typing. “It triggered a flashback. Remember that time at Russell when you let that girl light your back hair on fire?”
“That happened to you,” said Sam.
Wesley scraped a hand through his hair, which had hardened into Saharan waves from lack of washing. “It was me, wasn’t it? I was very high in those days. High in the spiritual sense, I mean. Swept aloft by tides of passionate feeling.”
“Uh-huh. You were like a comet, Wesley, a luminous spark against the pitch-black depths of the universe. That was you, my friend. That was you.”
“I remember my back hair, after the burning, it grew in richer, thicker, darker. Resulting in the glistening, manly pelt I have today. There’s a lesson there, isn’t there?”
“You let that same girl tie your back hair up in little red ribbons, so that you had all these jaunty little back-hair ponytails.”
“That made me feel like a gift for someone very special when she did that.”
“You are a gift, Wesley,” said Sam. “A gift fit for—”
“Blah, blah, blah,” said Mina. “You guys should just make out and get it over with.” She kicked off one of her boots, then grabbed the other one by the heel and freed her foot with a vicious jerk. The second boot thumped to the floor.
Wesley said, “Hey, should I order a pizza?” The other two said no. He ordered one anyway, over the Internet.
After a few minutes of the Weather Channel Sam stood, plucked the controller from his sister’s lap, and returned to the uncomfortable armchair. A few clicks through the cable listings found an episode of Secrets Only Dead Men Know.
■ ■ ■
What distinguished Secrets Only Dead Men Know from the rest of the fraternity of true-mystery shows was the wrinkle of perspective; each show was narrated in the voice of the deceased. The “ghost” of the dead person spoke over still photographs and reenactment footage, furnishing the audience with a guided tour of his or her life and, centrally, his or her demise.
That Friday evening’s episode concerned a wealthy fifty-one-year-old retired day trader named Kenneth Novey, who was inadvertently trapped in the panic room of his Saddlebrook, NJ, mansion on the evening of December 31, 1999.
The show’s first segment starts in small-town Minnesota, along the broad sun-dappled avenues of Kenneth Novey’s boyhood. There are clips of clattering bicycle wheels, empty tire swings breezily rotating, beautiful green trees, canvas sneakers slapping against sidewalk slabs. “Those were good times,” narrates the ghost of Kenneth Novey in the wry, gravelly voice of a man of experience. “Everything was so big and open then, I could never have imagined the way it would turn out . . .”
The segment continues through the major events in Novey’s life before the accident: the ground-floor position in the successful hedge fund (an ATM spraying reams of money), his Aspen marriage to a Charlotte debutante (a couple of actors kissing under a shower of rice), the birth of his son, Hannibal (a doughy, leering baby), the golden parachute that cleared his days of purpose (the
slamming of tall glass doors), estrangement and divorce (the formerly kissing couple jabbing fingers at each other from opposite sides of a conference room table), an increasingly agoraphobic existence in his mansion in Saddlebrook (the male actor, red-robed, eating hummus with a spoon and peering between curtains), and finally, the installation of a panic room (welders welding), and his fatal entrance on the night of December 31, 1999 (the red-robed actor keying open the vault, stepping inside, and the stainless-steel doors murmuring shut).
“I felt safe in there.” Novey’s ghost chortles. “Safe as a pharaoh.”
The show broke for advertisements. The first two commercials were national spots—one for a fancy duster, another for healthful blue potato chips. The third was local, an ad for a monster-truck rally in Suffolk County.
“By God, these are some angry vehicles!” roars Booth in his voice-over.
Sam clicked the mute button.
“It was a totally cute ad,” Mina protested. “You can tell that Dad ad-libbed a lot of it. ‘Angry vehicles.’ That’s pure Dad.” She dropped her voice into a credible imitation of their father: “ ‘The Engines of Doom rev their terrible fury! Listen—and behold! Tickets start at only twelve-ninety-five!’ He’s so great.”
Sam unmuted the television, and then quickly muted it again when a tight shot of Jo-Jo Knecht appeared on the screen. He was at the wheel of a 1970 GTO. It was an ad for the used-car chain that Jo-Jo fronted. The idea of the series was simple: a person tried to leave the used-car lot without buying something, and the retired catcher roared up in the GTO to block the departure, à la the ’98 World Series and Esteban Herrera’s doomed dash for home. The GTO had been desecrated with a pin-striped paint job.
“Hey,” asked Mina, “isn’t that the guy your skank ex-girlfriend married?”
The show returned, and Sam unmuted the television without comment.
The actor playing Novey climbs out of his cot on the morning of January 1 and, cupping a yawn, uses his free hand to press the vault door’s release button. The door doesn’t open. The actor presses the button again. The door still doesn’t open. A third time, the actor hits the release button. The door stays shut.
“Uh-oh,” says the voice-over ghost. “This is . . . problematic.”
The actor in the reenactment soon discovers that his secure phone has no dial tone, his intercom is dead, and the wall of security monitors is blacked out. He begins a frantic circuit of his cell, patting the walls, looking closely at the welded seams. While this is going on, the ghost explains that since his divorce, he’s often lost track of time; today is the first day of a brand-new century. “Gee. I seem to have forgotten all about Y2K.”
■ ■ ■
It’s a programming glitch in the clock of the vault door’s locking mechanism that has trapped Kenneth Novey. At the stroke of midnight, the clock turned over to January 1, 1900, and the system overloaded.
A few weeks of playing Ping-Pong against the wall, reading and rereading an issue of Newsweek with a DNA helix on the cover, eating astronaut food, and writing letters to his toddler son gradually pushes the hedge fund millionaire into a state of irreversible despair. Kenneth Novey kills himself with an overdose of Ativan. It’s not until the summer, over four months after his suicide and half a year after he was shut in, that his ex-wife discovers him. “For the first time in years,” jokes the voice-over ghost, “I was happy to see her.”
The actress playing Novey’s wife screams and throws her arms around the mummified body in the control chair. One of the corpse’s desiccated arms cracks off and hits the floor, raising a puff of dust.
Sam’s own laughter surprised him; it had sort of burped out. The credits began to roll. He reached up and squeezed his jaw. There was a big grin on his face.
“Ick,” said Mina. “Can I put ‘hugging a mummy’ on your list, Wesley?”
“You probably should,” said Wesley. There was a knock on the door—the pizza. “Will you get that?” he asked.
When the pizza had been paid for and the box brought close enough to the couch for Wesley to access without discomforting himself, Sam announced that he was retiring for the evening. On top of all of the things that had depressed him that evening—job, poem, girl, movie, bar assholes—the television show had made him feel soiled. Through the entire half hour it was on, despite his seat in the uncomfortable chair, Sam didn’t shift. He watched in a state of rapture. More to the point: he was entertained. The true story of an unhappy man imprisoned in his own house, so forsaken that no one noticed his absence for months, who finally offed himself, gave Sam amusement. He wanted to see what would happen next. He had been amazed—thrilled, even—by the growing awfulness.
What was wrong with him that he should enjoy something like that?
And there it was: the ignoble awareness that if someone else had made Who We Are, he, too, would laugh.
6.
After Sam brushed his teeth, he found Mina waiting for him in his room. She was sitting on the bed and flipping through the stack of mail on his nightstand. “Are these checks?” she asked.
“Yes.” Bummer City sent him a residual every month. It was never a lot of money, a couple hundred dollars or so. If it were added up, though, he guessed he could buy a small house. “What’s up with you and Sandra?”
“Blech. Let’s not.” Jagged bits of silver hair stuck out from under the band of her DOOM watch cap and made her look tough and street-smart. “Are you ever going to cash them?”
“No.”
“Too bad.” Mina dropped the envelopes to the floor. She rose from the bed, and the plastic windows crinkled under her stocking feet.
“Thanks,” said Sam. “That’s helpful.”
His sister went to the window. There was a view of a fire escape and the rear of another apartment building and its fire escape. Down below was an empty gravel lot.
Mina’s silhouette in the window shrank her, made her the nine-year-old she had been when Tom brought her to Russell that weekend eight years earlier. Sam remembered her little girl’s blond hair.
She turned and sat on the windowsill. Her mouth was the same as his and Booth’s, but the small, sharp nose came from Sandra. The blue eyes were hers alone.
“Are you okay? You seem worse than usual.”
“I thought you hated me.” Sam went to pick up the envelopes.
“No. I was disappointed. I’m over it. Plus, Peter’s gay.”
Sam took the envelopes to his bedside table. “You’ll forgive me if I don’t pretend to be too upset. You’re seventeen. And look, I remember seventeen, and a girl who had a boyfriend, especially an older one, it was always a bad sign.”
“A bad sign how? Like, it meant the harvest wasn’t going to be plentiful? What century are you from? Seventeen-year-old virgins are in pretty short supply these days.”
“Don’t be a smart-ass. You know what I mean. I mean don’t be in a hurry to grow up. It’s not as awesome as it looks.”
“Why do you care so much if I have sex?”
Sam clapped his hands over his ears. “Can’t quite make you out. Something wrong with transmission system. Over?”
His sister put up her palms in a gesture of détente, and he uncapped his ears.
“I think we should get an apartment together.”
She looked serious, but Sam didn’t see how she could be. “I don’t think Sandra would go in for that.”
“Say she would.”
“But she wouldn’t.”
“You wouldn’t.”
The argumentative side of Mina was another gift from her mother. A grudging measure of admiration had to be paid to Sandra Whipple-Dolan’s debate skills. No conspiracy was too implausible (see Katrina, the secret coordinated assassination of thousands of blacks by the government during), no political cause too repugnant (see Chávez, Hugo), and no theory about Booth Dolan too idiotic (see Dolan, Booth, B-movie “star,” the hidden stores of wealth of), for Sandra to champion.
“If the
y couldn’t find weapons of mass destruction, how could they manage to hide, like, five thousand dead black guys?” Sam once made the error of asking her in relation to the Katrina plot.
Sandra stared through him with the thin-lipped smile of a righteous sacrifice staked to a mound of smoldering tinder. “We don’t know yet. But that doesn’t make them any less dead, now does it?”
When Sandra argued, it was like seeing a lab rat not even bother with the maze and just chew right through the particleboard to get to the cheese. Pair this vociferousness with Mina’s sanity, and you had a sparring partner with very heavy gloves.
“Fine. Let’s get an apartment, then,” said Sam. “You get Sandra to give the okay, and we’ll do it.” He knew it would never happen. Sam’s argumentative side drew more from Booth, though he was less of a bullshitter and more of a bluffer.
“Glad we got that settled,” said Mina.
“Great, let’s call her right now,” said Sam. He didn’t think it would take long.
“She’s not home.” Mina’s sanguinity raised an alarm.
“Well, where is she?”
“Bellevue.”
■ ■ ■
That summer her mother had begun to lock Mina in her bedroom at night. “For your safety,” said Sandra mysteriously, and refused to discuss the issue.
Mina’s counteroffensive was to go on Happiness Strike.
Each evening when Mina came home from school, she would do her homework and then curl up on the tile floor of the kitchen to sleep. To Sandra’s pleas that Mina sit down in a chair, or watch television, or have a bath, the daughter replied, “My place is to suffer.” At mealtime with her mother, Mina stopped eating anything except raw vegetables and would drink only tap water, refusing the Brita. Mina began to donate her possessions—favorite clothes that she had designed and made herself, beloved books and keepsakes, jewelry—to passersby outside their building. “Here is something I adore,” she’d say, and press a pair of shoes on a stranger.