Holy Water

by James P. Othmer

  Whether he’d be gone a day or forever, it didn’t matter. These were all the belongings he had.

  ~ * ~

  What amenities would his hypothetical hotel for wayward men have? Free legal and alcohol counseling for monthly guests? An on-call private investigator for the cuckolded? A nutritionist for the fast-food heart attack victim in the making? A concierge specializing in creative visitation outings and local strip clubs? How about a Barcalounger in every room? A maxibar?

  ~ * ~

  Although he had no idea where he might go, the act of packing filled him with a sense of excitement he hadn’t felt in many years, and the realization that he was actually leaving was a relief, at least when he wasn’t thinking of the shame and disgust bubbling one layer down. When he wasn’t dwelling on the death of love, the resurrection of guilt, the consequences of everything, and what the hell he was going to do with the rest of his life.

  Just before he left, right after he locked the front door for perhaps the final time, out of curiosity, he took a final look at the pool, and even after the vomit episode it was perfect.

  ~ * ~

  The Rabbit Angstrom Suite. The I-Told-You-So Post-Nup Business Center. Only men’s rooms in the lobby.

  ~ * ~

  The first motel he sees is a one-story cinder-block structure just south of Tarrytown, with none of the aforementioned amenities. “Just for the night,” he tells the old man behind the Plexiglas.

  “You can have it by the hour too,” the old man offers.

  He takes out an order of hot-and-sour soup and Szechuan chicken at a strip mall across the street and eats it looking out the window of Room 111 onto the parking lot. Already he’s seen others like himself, unfolding out of the second-string family car, sulkily walking to their rooms, carrying their takeout, their brown paper bags, one with all his belongings in a gym bag, another with more luggage than anyone would ever take on a business trip.

  ~ * ~

  Motel Three (because she’s getting half of everything you have), you could call it. Or the Cleaners (because that’s where you’re about to be taken).

  Or simply Asylum.

  ~ * ~

  He spends the rest of the night oblivious of his surroundings, transfixed in front of his laptop, downloading songs and albums off the Internet and thinking of what to do next. Sometimes the music informs his thinking and sometimes it is the other way around. It has always been that way with Henry. He cannot carry a tune and has never shown any aptitude for playing an instrument, yet he believes that music has moved and taught him far more than any book or person. He’s spoken to others who claimed to feel the same way, but they were different. They always seemed more obsessed with the facts and dates of when a group formed, when it changed drummers, when it broke up, when the import single became available in the States, but Henry never cared about any of that. What he cared about was the music and how it made him feel. His father often told him that he used music as an escape, a way to hide from the world, but Henry had always thought about it as a way to discover it.

  Tonight he is ripping and sampling songs like a man who may never hear music again.

  When he falls asleep, it is three a.m. and David Ford’s “State of the Union” is playing, from the album I Sincerely Apologize for All the Trouble I’ve Caused.

  ~ * ~

  Sometime in what’s left of the night his cell phone rings. “One more thing,” Rachel says. “In Vegas, I met an old friend. And the sex was outstanding.”

  ~ * ~

  Snipped

  The song for the morning commute, by design, is “Rusty Cage” by Johnny Cash.

  You wired me awake

  And hit me with a hand of broken nails. . .

  At nine a.m. he walks unannounced into Giffler’s office and closes the door.

  Giffler puts down a book he’s pretending to read: Beehive Management: How Life in the Honeycomb Translates to Winning in the Workplace. “Dworik gave me this. What a bunch of hooey.”

  “I want a guaranteed contract, first-class accommodations, and a hell of a lot more money than these assholes are paying me now.” Crazy he can put up with. Work with. Adultery? Not so much.

  Giffler smiles, does a slow-motion slap of his hand upon the desk. “That’s my boy.”

  ~ * ~

  “Is a typhoid shot a billable expense?”

  Meredith nods. “Typhoid, hep A, hep B, Japanese encephalitis, malaria, rabies, swine, avian, and a tetanus-diphtheria booster. All billable if not universally recommended.”

  “The perks never stop,” Henry says.

  “Who says this is not a compassionate multinational conglomerate?” adds Warren.

  Henry smiles. They are in a side booth at the Ginger Man in Midtown, a long, narrow beer hall filled with young, end-of-the-workday drinkers. The morning and most of the afternoon were spent decompressing with one Human Resources group and introducing himself to another. Accelerated orientations, a crash course in international business protocol, were scheduled. Background packets were expedited his way. He was green-lighted, fast-tracked, and shown the door. And this is his party: Meredith and Warren, who is wearing a vintage Indian Nehru shirt that Henry decides not to acknowledge. Norman from the gym said he’d try to make it and Giffler swore to God he’d show, but Henry knows better than to count on that.

  He could have invited others—the rest of the Underarm Research Division, whoever’s left from his days in Oral Care or Non-headache-related Pain Relief or Laxatives, or the ill-fated Silicon-based Sprays and Coatings team—but that would have been just a clusterfuck of negativism that would have had a This Is Your Life vibe that would have cast an all-too-revelatory light on an extended period of said life that Henry, in retrospect, would rather forget.

  This degree of negativism is much more manageable. And because this is his going-away party, and his wife has just evicted him from his house and her life, and he’ll be taking a very long plane ride to a very strange place, very soon Henry has decided that it is absolutely okay to drink again. Just a beer or two. As long as he’s not chasing it with ostrich.

  Meredith and Warren want to know how it went with Giffler and company this morning, so he gives them a best-of version of the wit and wisdom dispensed by his delusional life mentor and soon-to-be long-distance supervisor. Such as:

  “The more efficient we get as consultants, the less money we make, so . . . By. All. Means. Take. Your. Bloody . . . Time.”

  And, “I’ve outsourced hundreds of jobs these last few weeks, but you, Henry—your whole miserable life is being outsourced.”

  And, “Our clients want to hear that we’re outsourcing people assigned to their business, not because it’s the strategically right thing to do but because it covers their trembling asses and says, ‘I am a fiscally responsible manager and a passive-aggressive advocate of the corporate trend du jour.’ Which is why we’re diversifying beyond India and Prague. It’s the newness of this place, not the practicalities of it, that makes us seem enlightened.”

  And, “Don’t ever say the word millennium again. It will be nine hundred and eighty years before that word will be in the least bit cool.”

  And, “Teach your children engineering and Mandarin or else in ten years they’ll be mowing lawns and cleaning toilets for someone with the last name of Hung.”

  And this: “Be careful over there, because I swear to God, Hank, if any thing ever happened to you . . .”

  Meredith shakes her head. “Hank?”

  “Confucius-like in his wisdom,” Warren says. “Most people go to the East to absorb its ancient truths, but you’re going with a whole suitcase full of your own, courtesy of a white-collar sociopath.”

  “Are you excited?” Meredith asks.

  Henry stares at her. Is he? Simple enough question, but he is stumped. He tries to guess what’s playing on the sound system. Fergie? Duffy? Pink? Doesn’t matter. No meaning, ironic or symbolic, to be gleaned there. “Actually, I don’t know enough about where
I’m going to be excited. I’m excited to be leaving, but I should be equally excited about my destination. But the truth is. . . Truth is, I haven’t given it a whole lot of thought.”

  Meredith pretends to sip her seltzer as she maintains eye contact with Henry. Warren looks around. Coughs into his fist. “I’ve got to take a leak.”

  After Warren leaves, Henry says, “Rachel threw me out yesterday.”

  Meredith nods. “I know. She called.”

  “Did she tell you why?”

  “No. I already knew.”

  He starts to ask how she knew, then decides it doesn’t matter. Just assume she knows everything.

  “She’s been studying witchcraft, you know.”

  Meredith nods. “She said she put a virility-sapping spell on you.”

  Henry opens and closes his legs under the table, sips his Hoegaarden. “She said she knows how to make my penis dry up and fall off.”

  “So you’re going to leave the country to work in a place you never heard of because your wife threw you out?”

  Henry nods.

  “Because you falsified a vasectomy?”

  Of course she’d know. “Pretty much. Yeah.”

  Neither speaks for a while. Henry decides that anything he says to Meredith will be redundant, something already known. It is Fergie on the sound system. Fergie with the Black Eyed Peas, anyway. “Boom Boom Pow.”

  “I chickened out. She didn’t seem all that. . .all that stable. She’d already changed her mind about kids, our house, her job, several times, and I just thought that this was something that you don’t want to mess with unless you’re certain.”

  “What about saying no, Henry? Did that ever occur to you?”

  “She’s studying to be a bloody witch.”

  “Probably because she’s looking for what is lacking in her life.”

  “She could have joined a reading group.”

  “Again, all you had to do is tell her you don’t want a vasectomy and you are not interested in being the soul mate of a child of Artemis.”

  “We had no sex life. I’m thirty-two, and even after I was supposed to have had it, she barely let me near her anyway.”

  “But—”

  “And she cheated on me. In Vegas.”

  Meredith straightens up. “I see. This is more info than even I need to know. Listen, you’re a great person on the inside, Henry. With all the right principles and convictions. The problem is you lack the balls to act on them.”

  “So I should go?”

  She sighs.

  And indeed there will be time

  To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”

  . . . “Do I dare

  Disturb the universe?”

  He looks at Meredith and feels ashamed. Few people have this effect on him, but often without prompting, condescending, or saying a word, she has the ability, in her mere presence, to make him fully aware of his deficiencies as a human. Boom Boom Pow.

  “Shakespeare?”

  She shakes her head dismissively. “Eliot.”

  “I guess you know I’ve visited your Web site.”

  She nods. “Several times a day. Every day. I can track the hits right back to our server, your office, your home PC.”

  “Right. Well, it’s very well done, you know. The graphics and the. . .”

  Warren comes back and slides into the booth. “Miss anything?”

  ~ * ~

  They order sandwiches and another round as Warren begins to lay out his plans for his forthcoming trip to India. Flights, inoculations, accommodations. Lots of talk about Slumdog Millionaire. Henry appears to be listening, but he isn’t. Maybe 50 percent of the time the words register, but the other 50 percent he is thinking about the course of his life so far and he realizes that Meredith is right, that he is the problem. Not suburbia or Metro-North or overdosing on armpit sweat focus groups or a cheating, mentally unstable wife who wants to be a witch. Well, maybe all that is part of the problem, but what has he ever done to change it? To prevent it?

  “I got a two-bedroom place in one of the most exclusive condominiums in Bangalore for next to nothing,” he doesn’t hear Warren say.

  But he does see two construction workers at the bar looking at Meredith, then at him in a way that can be described only as disdainfully. As if he is half a man. Unworthy of the company of a woman like Meredith, let alone, if they only knew, none other than EEEEva EEEEnormous. And he has to admit, they might be half right.

  “I’m not just gonna be in Bangalore, though. All over their region. Mumbai. Delhi. Shit, I may even make it up to your neck of the Himalayas, Henry.”

  Henry doubts that his father ever dwelled on his role as a man. His vocation. His direction. He went to Vietnam against his will and never spoke about it again. He got married to a woman his brother fixed him up with, got a job in sales because his father-in-law set it up, and to this day it remains a mystery to Henry whether or not he enjoyed any of it. He just kept his mouth shut and soldiered on. Like a man. Right up until the off-site. The coronary.

  After his father died Henry wanted to ask his mother if she was satisfied with the path of her life. Marriage. Kids. Suburbs. Taking a backseat to Dad’s supposed career when he’s certain she would have been a star at whatever career she’d chosen if she’d been born in a different family, or ten years later. But he never asked, and sixteen months after his father died she was married to a real estate man named Alexi who made her—to Henry’s. . . what? Dismay is the only word for it—so happy that he no longer had the desire to ask the question or the stomach to handle its reply, because who enjoys seeing his mother more in love with a man than she was when she was with his father?

  Norman arrives and slides in alongside Henry. After introductions Henry asks if he can get him anything. “No thanks. Got really wasted last night.”

  “Wow. Where was the party?” Meredith asks.

  “Actually, I was alone in my apartment, doing a marathon viewing of season one of Gossip Girl on DVD.”

  Within minutes Norman has given up on abstinence (“Oookaaay. . . Bourbon, rocks”) and may or may not have slipped something into his mouth, Henry can’t be sure, and has his laptop open and is showing them his latest film, a four-minute documentary on a day in the life of a Gulf War I reenactor. It’s hard to hear what the reenactor is saying over the tiny laptop speakers because the music in the bar is so loud, so they can only watch as a man in full U.S. Army Desert Storm fatigues goes through SCUD gas-mask application, entrenching, and weapons drills in what looks, at least initially, like a desert environment.

  “So he’s the only one?” Meredith asks.

  “Yeah. For now.”

  “And was he really there?”

  “Oh, no. He’s just a buff.”

  “I think I just saw the mast of a sailboat,” Warren says. “Where’d you shoot this?”

  Norman takes an exaggerated breath. “That’s the thing. We had to do it at Robert Moses State Park. We started at Jones Beach, but it was too crowded, even on a weekday morning, and the park police kicked me out for not having a permit.”

  “I thought I heard waves crashing,” Meredith adds. “Far off in the desert.”

  Henry watches the reenactor lumbering along the beach/desert and diving into the sand to get a better look at the invisible Republican Guard. The laptop screen is small and there’s a glare from the outside window, but at one point a sand castle is clearly visible in the background, and now Henry is fairly sure that the protagonist’s assault rifle is plastic.

  “Are there many more like him?” Meredith continues. “Are there, like, Falklands reenactors? Sons of Grenada?”

  Norman shakes his head. “He’s the only one. Which is the appeal, you know. The uniqueness of his story.”

  Norman and Warren hit it off. They continue talking about film and vocation and life long after Meredith and Henry lose interest. They continue talking even after Norman realizes that Bangalore-bound Warren is not a potential
personal-training client.

  “Anyway, ultimately,” Meredith tells him, “I think it can turn into a good thing, your taking this trip, this job. If only for a while.”

  “But you just mocked my lack of preparation, my going for all the wrong reasons.”