The brother-in-law replied to Foster’s explanation with a lift of his chin. But he looked no more convinced than before.
“That’s an expensive paperweight,” said his father.
“With storage fees—yes, it certainly makes for one,” said Foster.
“Well, we all have our hobbies—though not exactly the game of kings, is it?” said his father. “You golf, Cobb?” his father asked the in-law, whom he had always called by his last name, Foster suspected because he couldn’t retain his first name either.
“He’s been golfing with the Grandfuncle,” Foster answered for him, referring to his uncle and grandfather, who kept in each other’s constant company, and of which Cobb today looked every bit the emergent connubial bud.
“Twice,” added the in-law.
“Sport of kings,” repeated his father.
“Overrated,” said Foster mostly into his water glass.
“Fucking hangar fees are overrated,” said his father in a sudden flare. “C’mon, you play all the time with your free-wheeling Orientals.”
“More before, than now,” said Foster watching the in-law for traces of an additional discomfort which never appeared.
“That’s right, you’re in Saint Louis now—how do you like it?” asked his brother-in-law.
“It’s very proud of itself, but for what, I can’t tell. Otherwise, it’s pretty—like here. And where it’s not pretty, it’s ugly—like here.”
His father shooed the question away with an emphatic wave of both hands, as though it had already exhausted him. “Ask him what he did before. Ask him what he did before—don’t you want to know what he did before?” he directed Cobb.
“What did you do before?” he asked as instructed.
“I worked for a risk consultancy.”
“Do you know what that is? Ask him what that is,” he gestured sharply .
“What is that?” asked the in-law, dutiful and aloof, and looking from the one to the other.
Foster had an uncomfortable intuition for this new direction, and felt a sudden preoccupation with his forelock, which he caught himself pawing. “Corporations,” he said, “or governments—agencies, all have strategies, or products; they want to expand—put factories in new markets, etc; and all of these activities present risks, vulnerabilities. They might be political or civil, or competitive—technological. But they want to know what they are, and assess them. And, as much as possible, protect against them.”
There was a pause in which they drank, the in-law, as though he were nursing a medicine, and his father, as though he were thirsty—and with a look of satisfaction as though he had been. He fixed on the charm which he now spun in consecutive turns. His lips were thin and still, but the muscles of his jaw clenched and writhed.
“Did you enjoy that work?” asked the in-law, tentative, and desperate to expel the same stillness that had squeezed him from the other room.
“No! No! No!” said his father, the words cleaved between by the edge of his rigid hand. “That’s not the question at all! The question is: tell me about your clients. Your clients! Who were they? Did you like it . . .” he repeated dismissively.
“Who were your clients?” asked the in-law, his eyes now fixed on Foster’s father. Foster looked at him too.
“Corporations. Governments,” said Foster.
“Large corporations,” said his father.
“Yes. Large corporations,” said Foster.
“Government agencies,” said his father.
“Government agencies,” affirmed Foster.
“Department of Energy,” said his father.
“Yes. That was one,” said Foster. “Are we going to catalogue them all?”
“You get that, Cobb?” asked his father with a rap of his knuckle against the white marble counter.
“What was your field?” asked the in-law. This time rather than veto, his father also awaited the answer.
“Technology,” said Foster. “Some hardware, but mostly software. Software and security.”
“Flying out to dine with Orientals three times a month,” said his father.
“We had many clients in Taiwan, Singapore, and China,” said Foster to the in-law. “In fact, I’ll be at a conference in Beijing—”
“Now, ask him what he does now,” his father instructed Cobb. The in-law turned to Foster, but was stayed by a shake of Foster’s head and his lifted hand.
“Professor,” answered Foster, no longer entirely certain to whom.
“What do you teach?” asked the in-law, of his own.
“Assistant Professor of Computer Science. At Washington University,” Foster added summarily.
“The Yale of East Jesus,” said his father. “And Catherine?”
“What about Catherine?”
“Where is she now?” asked his father.
“On the sofa, probably!”
“Where is she staying now? Howard? Is she in this Middle-West oasis with you?”
“No,” said Foster, and looked at Cobb, and wished to God he had the common sense to go away. “No—you know that answer.”
“Where is she then?” continued his father.
“She’s here,” said Foster.
“Did she ever go?”
“Yes, she went.”
“For how long? How long did she stay, Howard?”
“She came for two months,” said Foster. “Two,” he said, and held up two fingers on his hand, and kept them there.
“Did she like it?” asked his father.
Foster laughed. “No. No, I don’t think she did.”
“Did she like your new position?” asked his father. He spun the charm violently once more. When it eventually stopped, he lifted the glass for a drink which no part of him seemed to enjoy.
“I have no idea,” said Foster.
“Do you think she’ll come back? To you. In Saint. Louis?”
Foster looked dully at Cobb, and Cobb returned his gaze, but with a voyeur’s curious appetite.
Foster moved to speak.
“No!” roared his father. “Because, now you’re a fucking school teacher!”
Foster had closed his eyes to the gale of sound, and when they were opened, his mother stood in the doorway to Cobb’s shoulder. She wore a smart dress, and boots, a holiday wrap, and a stern countenance.
His father looked to her, and then to Cobb. “You enjoy cigars, Cobb?” he asked.
Cobb looked suddenly ashen, and shook his head imperceptibly.
“Good!” said his father. “I have just the thing. Come along,” he said, dumping the half Manhattan in the sink with a thrust, “and we can have a drink.”
The two had gone quickly through the servants’ exit, but his mother followed them with her eyes as though they might still be seen. And just then, Catherine came striding up the hall behind her—bearing a smile residual to some other joke, some other thought, some other happiness. Whatever it may be, Foster hated the smile; he hated its timing; and it occurred to him with a rare and vivid clarity, that he hated her.
3.
The departure hall at Tel Aviv’s Ben-Gurion airport was a vast inverted dome of polished stone pavements, departure boards, bistro tables, and duty-free shops. There were low, chrome and leather chairs and a fretwork of potted plants. There was the trot of baggage casters, and the cry of soft shoe rubber, and a marbling of the tones of human conversation as though it were a smoke on the air. There was a reflecting pool made rough and viscous by a fountain raining silence two-and-a-half stories the look of glass beads, and landing with a weighted punctuation. And there was a skylight through whose great round pupil a severe illumination shot down into the hall and onto the pool, and at this time of day, made it unbearable to see.
Foster had drawn his wheeled carryon with the limp resignation of
a child towing a short-handled wagon, shuffling from the arrival gate through the crisp corridors of glass and stone. All airports have a character, however similar they may be—some resemble malls, others high school gymnasiums—this one, Foster thought, had the mood of a conference center; with the consequence that his tired clothes and greasy hair, and deep chemical emptiness, the way his shoes felt moist in the sole and serrated at the instep, cast him as materially apart from the chic and genial tableau. When he’d made his way to the fountain and the low chairs of the departure hall, he’d turned one away from the pool with a loud chromoly bark, and fallen heavily into it. The fierce light bit into the back of his eyes and he attempted to shield them by laying them upon everything but the blazing water.
Foster had drifted into a warm daze of rotating advertisements and crimson departure board text, and was entirely unsure whether it had been ten minutes or twenty, when the man from the Executive Office appeared with two coffees.
“An aperitif for the consciousness,” said the man when he’d set them on a small table and taken the chair opposite Foster. “Perhaps you could use one.”
Foster took it, carefully prized the lid and blew across the cup with an effort whose sound vanished within the roar of the fountain. Foster noticed that The Familiar, after only a moment, seemed already to have forgotten his. Foster also noticed his shoes, which were spotless and unmarred by casters or baggage. In fact, as Foster performed a quick survey of the hall, The Familiar and two dire and substantial looking men at a nearby bistro table were the only souls unencumbered by some form of luggage or another.
“Were you traveling?” asked Foster, “Or were you already here?”
The man, who’d been staring into the impossible light of the fountain, massaged the bridge of his nose, and turned to Foster: “You are improbably tall for the service. Nobody thought better of it when they signed you?”
“My recruiter thought I’d be a good situational fit—a double-guess at the edge, or worst case, mistaken for a Throwaway. But he also thought I’d probably be an analyst,” said Foster.
“I suppose he did,” said the man. “You had a family trade: why not that?”
“I don’t know,” said Foster, “a couple hundred years of textiles is enough, isn’t it? Besides, isn’t that the whole Skull and Bones angle?”
The man rubbed his hands together and glanced at Foster. “How are we coming?” he asked.
“It’s going slowly,” said Foster, “but going well.”
“Going well. Oh, that’s excellent—and where are we then?”
“About the middle; maybe just past,” said Foster trying for a calibrated optimism.
“And what does that look like?” asked the man.
“How do you mean?”
“The middle: what does it look like?”
Foster’s struggling mind went suddenly blank and damp: a yellowed leaf of paper with all the type shaken free. Foster peered at the man—lost momentarily to anything but the search of his features for the exact tenor of his question. “Like a bunch of unfinished code,” he said. “Like a nest of wiring that’s been made but unconnected.”
“I see,” said the man. “I appreciate the visual. Virtual warfare is so ephemeral, it makes for a difficult image. But thankfully, now I’ve got it: an irredeemable knot of diminishment and misconception.”
“That’s not what I said.”
“I get a strong impression of it,” said the man.
Foster set back into his chair as deeply as possible and breathed over the coffee clasped between his hands.
“But it’s going well?” asked the man.
“Yes,” said Foster, “I think so.”
“And you’re somewhere in the middle?”
“Yes,” said Foster. “I would say so.”
“This middle: is of an object, or of a novel?”
Foster looked at the man and drank from his tall paper cup.
“One is marked by coordinates, Foster, the other merely by a mood,” said the man.
“The middle of a process,” said Foster, after what seemed to him an intolerable interval of the fountain’s heavy body falling against itself in long, shifting, unbroken consonants.
“Enjoy Beijing?” asked the man. “Keeping the old fires warm?”
“So far as I know, being moved and being blown are different things,” said Foster. “The conference was a fit.”
“You feeling defensive, or is that just a sound you make?” asked the man. His suit was a gray pinstripe today, whose jacket was unfastened. He adjusted the lay of his tie; he inspected the glasses on the cord round his neck closely for clouds or prints, and then gazed unflinchingly into the fountain and its cauterizing light before turning again to Foster. “I think it’s a paradox,” he said.
“What’s a paradox?”
“Your chair. Your chair Dr. Foster—is a paradox. Do you know what it is?”
Foster glanced vaguely at the leather arms as he blew again across his coffee. “If the answer’s anything but, ‘a chair,’ I think I’ve lost this one already,” he said.
“You’re feeling glib,” said the man. “All limbered up on prawns and fortune cookies?”
“No,” said Foster, the man’s remark striking at his tenuous buoyancy. “Not really—just tired as all hell.”
“Do you know what it is?”
Foster began a gesture which upset his cup. When it had settled, he said, “I guess not.”
“Corbusier.”
Foster shook his head.
“French designer.”
Foster took a sip and shook his head again.
“He was an architect; he was a designer. He designed your chair, which by the way, is called Le Petit Confort,” said the man. “’Comfort,’ is the temptation for the Anglo tongue, but the French is ‘confort.’” He added: “They have the same meaning of course,” and idly adjusted his cup as though it were a large piece on a small board, but did not drink. “Fear not, Dr. Foster,” he said, “ you’re a well-established philistine, and hardly expected to know these things.”
Foster’s mind felt heavy and keenly unlubricated, and he realized now that he’d lost any intuition for the path of the conversation.
“Design classics, Dr. Foster. This means nothing to you, of course, but the licensed versions are quite costly.”
“Why would they be here then?” asked Foster.
The man from the Executive Office touched his bent finger to the end of his nose. “Precisely! Why would they be here, in the middle of a busy airport departure hall in the middle of Israel?”
Foster shook his head again. “I don’t know.”
“That is the essence of the paradox. Are they authentic, or are they imitations—reproductions? I struggle to make up my mind whenever I see them.”
“If they’re expensive, why would they be in the middle of an airport? They wouldn’t be real—surely,” said Foster.
“Any other airport they would be reproductions. It goes without saying.” “Dubuque to Paris—they’d be fakes every time. But in Tel Aviv? In Israel? The question is more complex.”
Foster drank from his coffee, briefly glanced into the fountain, and regretted it all the while blue spots dissolved from his vision and he blinked bitterly at the man.
“You doubt it—you think Jews are thrifty,” said the man.
“Is that a rumor?” asked Foster.
The man from the executive office laughed a sharp, granular laugh. “Famously! They are famously thrifty! Although, if it were widely known what they spend on intelligence per capita, I promise you, that view would be properly dispelled.”
“I’m feeling lost,” said Foster.
“Have you ever met an illiterate Jew?”
Foster shook his head with uncertainty.
“And you never will. A Jew
who cannot read, cannot be a man. He cannot be a man, and he cannot contribute to the faith. He must read the Torah to do either, and to read the Torah he must first read. It doesn’t mean that every Jew is armed with a design degree; but that as a population, no other people is as intrinsically predisposed to know if that chair—your chair—in the middle of the departure hall of Ben-Gurion, is a Corbusier.”
“No. I don’t follow at all,” said Foster, and noticed the pair of thick-necked men at the bistro table watching them intently.
“Dr. Foster . . . short a corps of Scandinavian architects, no clutch of Anglos are going to have a fucking clue as to whether these chairs were designed by Laurence Olivier, or Le Corbusier. The paradox, Dr. Foster, the paradox is—if you’re right on their reputation for thrift—that these then, should be more likely than the average to be reproductions.”
“This is not why we’ve met at Ben-Gurion,” said Foster.
The man leveled a gaze at Foster, for which he immediately regretted the interruption.
“If no other people are less likely to spend for such a luxury, and no other people are more likely to recognize the object, then no other people are as likely to know of a difference to suspect. In which case, what are you most likely to put before a suspicious people—a people wise to the difference: the genuine article, or a facsimile?”
For a time there was nothing but the noise of the hall and of the fountain between them.
“That is what I think when I see them,” said the man. “It closely resembles—Dr. Foster—what I think when I see you.” He now shifted the whole of himself in his chair pressingly toward Foster. “What would you put before me, Doctor? Are you authentic? Are you the real thing? I needn’t be a Jew to suspect—I know the difference. And whatever’s left of you—I strongly encourage you to produce the genuine article anyway.”
Equipment Page 8