Fearless

by Rafael Yglesias

  Her husband was great, she said, but she added that he was a little bitter because he hadn’t been made head of the drama school, although it had been understood for years he would be and yet when the time came someone from outside had been brought in.

  Her pain was tangible. She pushed it at him in a bumpy aggressive way, like a subway passenger elbowing to get past. “What about you?” he asked. “Are you still writing plays?”

  “No!” She scorned the idea and then said, “I’m a mess. I am thinking of going back to school. Get my Ph.D. and teach.” She reached out and slapped Max’s knee. “Tell me about you! You have a boy, right?”

  “A ten-year-old.”

  “Bet he’s smart like you.”

  “Smart…” Max thought about his son, who was certainly a good student, articulate and precocious. Does that mean he’s smart? “He’s like all the kids I know. He’s smart, but it’s copycat intelligence.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He imitates grown-up attitudes and says what his teachers want to hear. He’s a mirror of them and so they say he’s smart.”

  Behind her there was a fierce glow from the windows facing the street. The summer sun flashed on the cars parked outside and a beam pierced into the restaurant, striking Alison on the head. It seemed to come out of her mouth as speech: “That is being smart, Max,” she said. “What do you want him to imitate? A baboon?”

  “I just can’t shake the feeling that a really smart, an authentically brilliant child, wouldn’t seem brilliant to us. He’s smart in the same way we all are: he knows what we know, he believes what we believe. He’s being educated to be as dumb as the rest of us.”

  “Come off it, Max.” She was irritated. A truck drove into the restaurant’s windows without shattering them. But it covered the glowing light behind her, and her eclipsed face went dark with anger. “That’s crap. Believe me, I’ve seen plenty of dumb students. Students so dumb they couldn’t imitate what you know if you put a gun to their heads.” The sun bleached her face again and she was shooting him.

  Max reached out and caught her hand, frozen in an imitation of a gun, index finger threatening his brain. He could see how angry he had made her: the pain glowed about her eyes. “Don’t hate me,” he pleaded.

  “I don’t hate you. Don’t be ridiculous.”

  Max pulled her hand to him and kissed the fingers. They were plump and soft. He had remembered them as long and elegant, their touch cool. These were the hot whitened hands of a baker. She ignored him and said, “Just don’t tell me your son is a genius and it doesn’t make you proud.”

  He let go of her hand. “He’s not a genius. I didn’t say he was a genius.” He thought back and couldn’t remember what he had said, except that it was contemptuous of his son. “Did I? I mean if I did—”

  “Max, I’m exaggerating. Remember me? I exaggerate.” She covered the space between them, her head bobbing like a doll with a spring for a neck. “You just said he was bright. But you know what I mean.”

  “Let’s make love.” His belly was full and warm. He wanted to hibernate in a cave with her—dark and close and fucking slowly. She disappeared in the darkness again and he couldn’t see what she was feeling. She said something softly, but he didn’t hear and anyway he kept talking, right out of the center of his being, without censorship: “We’ll probably never see each other again and I’ve forgotten everything about myself. Haven’t you? I don’t remember who I was or what I am and that’s too sad. Makes me too sad to eat or sleep or argue. So let’s get a room now and make love.”

  He couldn’t see her face clearly. The restaurant’s window had altered the sun and now it had no light of its own. He tried to focus and see her eyes but they were hollow. He got up and she did too so he supposed she was willing. He put a twenty down on the table and she said, “That’s a twenty.” He assumed it was her way of saying yes.

  They walked. He put his arm around her shoulders and they felt comfortable, the right height, fitting easily within the shape of his reach. “Do you have a room?” she asked and laughed at what he answered, shaking her head as if he had been foolish. He didn’t know if she was right because he hadn’t heard his own voice. “I’ll wait here while you get it, okay?” She slipped away and sat down in a chair he hadn’t noticed. It seemed to appear under her just as she lowered herself. He looked down at her and had no idea who she was.

  The clerk seemed overjoyed about Max checking in. “Certainly, sir! We have a room.” He was a boy. Max was fascinated by his partial beard, a skinny line trailing erratically under cheeks that looked permanently flushed.

  Max didn’t talk while the clerk did the paperwork. His lips got stuck together and then he wasn’t sure he could talk. He nodded when the clerk asked if he was staying for one night and shook his head no when asked if he needed help with his bags.

  The carpeted floor undulated beneath his feet. He was able to walk on it without any trouble, like a graceful surfer. Alison was in the chair waiting. Many other chairs had been bred in his absence. A whole row of them flanked her, their empty arms gleaming sullenly.

  “I can’t believe I’m doing this,” she said as they rode on the sea together to the elevator.

  “Yeah, it’s amazing,” Max thought or answered, he wasn’t sure which, and he also didn’t know what he was referring to: the surfing, the crash, the acid, or checking into a hotel with Alison.

  Maybe I’m her husband, he thought, and giggled. Maybe I’m the father of her four children, of the dimwit and the cripple. I have tenure but insufficient power and money. My wife is fat.

  “Stop it,” she whispered and giggled.

  He was kissing her neck. He had found the familiar beauty mark that appeared at the start of the slope toward her shoulder. He tasted the dot with his tongue, a drop of chocolate that had no sweetness.

  They were in the room without Max knowing how. He searched for her face and found an eye, a nose, and at last her lips. He kissed her dry lips and snuggled deeper to find another pair that were moist and kinder; he wedged himself in and nestled. A sound thundered from a canyon and vibrated him.

  Sky appeared in his vision. A gray sky, but bright anyway. He glided warily, a hawk searching for his home.

  She laughed in the clouds. Her head was a painting, and yet it breathed, expanding out from the canvas. “Max! Let’s get into the bed…I’m too old to stand up,” she joked, her smooth skin wrinkling with laughter.

  “I’m sorry,” he tried to say, but he droned like an old turntable; the record moved too slowly under the stylus.

  “I love it. Don’t be sorry.” She moved away, a boat separating from the dock and he hung on, desperate, afraid he would fall in the water. She kept laughing. He fell on the bed. It was cool like water, but of course it bounced.

  I’m tripping, he thought.

  “I have stretch marks,” he said in his own ear.

  “I do?” he asked himself.

  More laughter. The sun set when she drew the curtains. Dark passed over the room as if a giant’s hand were blessing them. If God existed He could pass His palm over the earth and blacken it like that.

  “Don’t you believe in God?” she asked.

  Max opened his eyes. The ceiling was low, pressing down. A smoke alarm’s red light warned him: You are tripping and you have your eyes closed and you don’t know the fucking difference.

  “Where are you?”

  Her answer came from behind. He turned and saw her, mountainous beneath an unreal yellow bedspread. The color was unlike anything in nature. Her young face was scared.

  “Max. I didn’t bring my…you know…I didn’t think this was going to happen.”

  “You think too much,” he said and stared at the curtains. They were drawn but light glowed from all the edges. He listened to the whooshing noise of the air-conditioning and felt the low ceiling of prefabricated panels close in. It was similar to being in the DC-10. Everything modern was a coffin. He had struggled so hard to u
se the new materials, cheaper and faster to manufacture and install, and yet you could make nothing but death containers out of them. There was no wood on earth wide enough to make the floors of even the meanest barn of a hundred years ago. Nothing could achieve the simplest beauty of a Shaker table without their purer wood, their purer paint, maybe without even the pure air of a world gone forever. He had only colors that never lived, fabrics fused in laboratories, and walls created out of the letters and numbers of the periodic table. He had turned his back on the past and its impossible abundance and impractical patience; he had embraced the technology of his world, determined to be a man of his time, and it had tried to assassinate him.

  “Max, we don’t have to…Max!” Her head was a gargoyle snarling: “You bastard, I just wanted to talk!”

  She was lying under the bedspread, covered up to the neck, embarrassed and angry. I’m not being dutiful, Max realized. He moved from the floor (how he got there he didn’t know) to beside her on the bed. His body sloshed as if it were a half-full pail of water. He heard the cheapness of the room: everything creaked and groaned. He pried her hand away from the bedspread. Her fingers seemed to break under his pressure, but she didn’t cry out in pain.

  “Oh…” she sighed and shut her eyes as he lifted the covering off and exposed her.

  The white slab of flesh shivered and talked to him. He touched the palpitating hollow of her throat with the tip of his tongue and she was animate, rumbling. He trailed down the soft body, tasting salt and flour, and all over him happiness tingled. There was nothing skimpy or flimsy here: this was pure.

  He found a nipple and fed. He found folds and more nipples. He fed and fed. There were teats everywhere and heat, terrific heat, a sauna of love. “Take off your clothes,” he told himself, but there was no body to remove them from. He was only a mouth of liquids. He counted the breasts. There were five. He counted arms and there were eight. He counted the lips and there were six.

  “Oh my God,” she said.

  He was a mouth but no voice. He tried to ask why she wanted to discuss God but forgot the previous word as each new one was formed. Anyway, it wasn’t important. A sea poured up his body: hot, unwinding his muscles, and melting his bones.

  Where’s my cock? he wondered and opened his eyes. He didn’t have one. He had grown an abundant woman from his stomach. She swam out of him, her face relaxed.

  “You’re not angry anymore,” he said, the words sounding through his nose.

  “Oh God,” she answered.

  He laughed and told her: “There is no God.”

  The FBI man’s head was wide to begin with; and yet his ears stretched his face even more, comically projecting flesh farther from the center of his face, which was a small nose and tiny red lips. “Are you Max Klein?” he asked.

  Everything in Max’s mouth was stuck together; there didn’t seem to be any free space inside. “Hmmm,” he mumbled his yes. He realized he had no clothes on and hid his body behind the hotel door, clutching the edge of its frame. He had a headache too, he noticed, two lines of pain running from his cheeks and crossing his forehead, burning to the back of his skull.

  The wide-faced man opened a leather wallet. Inside there was a picture of that face with FBI in big letters beside it. “I’m Agent Parsons. This is my partner, Agent Smith.” Smith was black and skinny. The cool white collar of his shirt shimmered against his ebony neck. He seemed to be staring at a point above Max’s head. “You’re registered as a Mr. Max Klein of 505 West End Avenue? Is that correct?”

  Max felt shame. He knew he had been naughty, but he wasn’t sure what to select from his buffet of guilt: taking LSD, committing adultery, eating strawberries, the death of his partner, the abandonment of the children he had saved, peeing on private property…

  Meanwhile he mumbled, “Wait,” hurrying into his pants—he couldn’t find his underwear or his shirt. He let the G-men in, prepared to surrender. It wasn’t the sixties anymore: his behavior deserved punishment.

  “Do you have any identification?” Agent Parsons asked.

  Max gave Parsons his wallet and watched Smith wander around the room searching for something. “No bags?” Smith asked when he opened the closet and saw it was empty except for Max’s underpants and polo shirt.

  “It’s him,” Parsons said and showed his partner Max’s photo on his New York State driver’s license.

  I didn’t call my wife and son, Max remembered. That was the crime he had committed.

  “Were you on a flight to—?”

  “Yes,” Max interrupted. “I was there.”

  “You took a hike straight from the scene?” Smith asked. “Just upped and left?”

  “Yeah…” Max’s head throbbed and he held it in his hands. A vivid neon flash of his first and ultimately rejected drawing for the Zuckerman house on Long Island pulsed against his eyelids.

  “Your head hurting?” Smith asked and knelt in front of him, staring into his eyes. “Did you get checked by anybody?”

  “What time is it?” Max asked, wondering how many hours delinquent he was in telling his wife that she was not a widow.

  “One o’clock,” Smith said and then added: “P.M.”

  “One o’clock…?” Max was confused. The crash had happened at about twelve.

  Smith understood. “One o’clock, Wednesday afternoon.”

  He was a day delinquent. Max shut his eyes and the redesign of the Zuckerman patio flowed away from the boxy Cape, easing your eye toward a fantasized and improbable garden. In fact, everything Linda Zuckerman touched seemed to wither and die. He wished the things he drew were never built and never seen by his customers. What both his clients and his pencil imagined was always more satisfying than the compromise of their finished constructions.

  “Mr. Klein,” Agent Smith tapped him on the knee. “Can I ask you something?” Max opened his eyes. Smith’s right eye was bloodshot and he sounded as if he had a head cold. Max nodded. “What the hell are you doing here, man? You walked away from that crash, rented a car and drove here? Why?”

  Max’s eyes filled. He tried to hold the tears back, ashamed to cry in front of these very grown-up men. The image of the end had returned: twisted metal and lifeless bodies carried across the runway. Under the bright sun, the colorless concrete had pained his eyes. “They were starting to line them up,” Max mumbled. “They line up the corpses and tag them—” And they gather the scattered body parts, such as Jeff’s head, until all the broken pieces are put together again. He knew from watching CNN, he knew from the harsh magazine photos, he knew from years of accident voyeurism. “They didn’t need me anymore,” Max said.

  “Mr. Klein,” Smith said softly. “Why don’t you come with us? We’ll get ahold of your people and get you home.”

  “You’re not going to arrest me?”

  “You haven’t done anything,” Agent Parsons said.

  That’s what they think, Max answered silently.

  7

  He was taken to a hospital first. “I’m all here,” he told them, but they made sure anyway, X-raying and poking, evidently amazed by his wholeness.

  “No concussion.” A woman doctor who looked as if she were only slightly older than his ten-year-old son. “But he’s definitely suffering from some sort of posttrauma reaction.”

  “He’s in shock?” Agent Smith.

  Max listened. While they discussed him his legs dangled on the examining table. His behind crinkled the light blue sanitary paper that covered it.

  “No,” the child doctor said low, trying to whisper. “He’s having a stress reaction.”

  I’m still high, you dummy, Max thought and giggled. The doctor raised her eyebrows to Agent Smith about the giggle with the air of a lawyer who had established the proof of his case.

  The government men phoned the airline. Why the airline? Max wondered. It made the company seem very important, as if Transcontinental Corporation were the highest authority in the United States. Agent Smith asked him whether h
e wanted to call home.

  “You do it,” he said. “Tell my wife I’m free.”

  “What?” Agent Smith asked.

  “I mean, fine. I’m fine and fancy-free.”

  They put him in a darkened area, with a curtain drawn all around, something in between an examining room and a hospital bed. There was classical music playing through a speaker in the wall. He lay down and slept.

  “Hello,” a freckled face said and smiled brightly, mouth wide, teeth showing white for a few seconds and then going out, like a camera’s flash. “Sorry to wake you. It’s about three-thirty now. You’re still at the hospital in Pittsburgh. I’m Cindy Dickens from Transcontinental Air. I’m here to help get you home. How do you want to go? We’ll arrange any flight or transportation you like. I’m sorry. You look tired. Can I get you some coffee?”

  He felt much better for the nap. She got him coffee. Cindy watched him drink. When he was done he felt he had his brain back in residence. He asked Cindy if his family had been informed.

  “Oh yes. We had someone from the New York office go personally to your home and give them the good news. We offered to fly them here but they said—”

  “That it’s time for Max to come home,” he completed the statement for her.

  For a moment Cindy’s performance of a human being was paused; she peered out into the audience like a puzzled actress wondering who had heckled her. She seemed about to ask a conversational question and then switched back to her efficient checklist: “Should I get you on the next flight to New York?”

  Max waited for his terror of flying to appear in his head—but it didn’t come. His thoughts were merely practical. For the first time in his life he considered only how to get somewhere quickly, not safely. “Sure. Do I get to go first class?”

  Cindy cocked her head to one side and a smile appeared briefly, but she answered in her role’s neutral tone: “All complimentary, sir, of course. May I book you on Transcontinental Air?”