Equipment

by Hesse Caplinger

  4.

  McDonnell 162 seemed an outland, a far shoulder of the campus away from the warm and slender hutch of rooms which were the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. For Foster it had all the anesthetic charm of a Victorian operating theater, and today it had all the mood as well. It was a steeply-raked cavern of stepped and polished concrete, one hundred fifty molded wooden seats fixed with a scrap of carpet for grip, a towering arrangement of black boards, a projection booth, and finished from every corner in an oak paneling which soared up into a heady distance where it joined nothing less than pious scholarship. It smelled vaguely of damp metal, soiled denim, and forgotten places.

  He had the air handlers for company, casting a tepid warmth the flavor of burnt toast into the grinding silence; the hard drive of his drowsing laptop whining and clicking with the aimless spasms of a dreaming puppy; and the dire likeness of a figure—which at this distance, and in this light—read as little more than an old white man in a funeral suit. It hung safely out of reach or sight above the far stair, and bore all the properties of something lifted from a boardroom tanned in Cuban tobacco. Foster had never bothered with it, or the solemn declarations of its brass plaque; but no doubt it was some benevolent corporate titan, perhaps a friend of his grandfather’s; the sort who spend their first act clenching a whip in their teeth, and the second act, a cork—in that intoxicated baronial pastime: philanthropy—the way scorched-earth warriors build churches in the flaccid amber penance of their reckoning. Nothing takes out bloodstains like a good ribbon cutting ceremony, thought Foster. And then he wondered at the thought. Today was all an off and uncharacteristic thinking: even a few sniffs of the paper rose in the men’s lavatory had done little but cramp his jaw and set his mind a-fidget.

  It was December ninth—last day of classes: a dusting of snow lay over the ledges, the low, brittle ivy bed, the planter mulch, and everywhere the salt gravel did not hold. The air was cold and hard and the sun presented itself as little more than an imperceptible change in temperature for the whole of the day. Foster had left the Suburban in a spot near the loading docks and the snow and grit had yet to run from the lugs of his boots when Jeffrey Sachs came visiting at his office.

  Bryan Hall was one of several late-sixties architectural addendums to an otherwise strictly neo-gothic campus: a Bauhaus layer-cake of rough red quartz granite and concrete slab, with a small addition of cantilevered volumes for suspense. Foster thought its legacy would resolve as the mere proof something had been built there in nineteen-seventy. It served as one of several wings of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences: much of the computer science faculty occupied its upper floors. Foster’s own office—he was convinced it was two broom closets stitched together with drywall and paint—was a windowless box first level below grade, its rear wall intruded by a structural column as if for strength of effect. This was to be a temporary accommodation that persisted, and Foster had a notion it was some sort of tenure-track hazing.

  A small plaque in close print read ‘H. Charles Foster, PhD.’ This was mounted to the heavy, windowless fire door. And it was in this open doorframe that Jeffrey Sachs now stood in his jaunty rumpled pea coat and his weather-slicked cowboy boots, and offered his characteristic Cheshire grin—as though a bit of mutually-appreciated humor had just preceded him.

  “Professor-doctor-Foster,” called Sachs, leaning into the doorframe. Foster had been composing his thoughts, and though he observed Sachs drawing up in the doorway, when he spoke he lost the fiber of his thought entirely. What arose in its place as he looked up into the white hum of the phosphorus light, and at Sachs and his heedless ebullience—heedless of wet boots and cold-bitten fingers, heedless of beguilements, of emerging and wear-slicked personal indifference, of the sum of personal failures paid in mortgage for each middling success—was: Does that tingling, ignorant urgency return? Do the fires of that stupid, warm-drooling original joy rekindle? Or does life simply outlive the sense for its own pleasure? This is what Foster thought, and offered Sachs nothing but the pallid expression of its thinking.

  Sachs rapped on the opened door with a suppressed theatricality: “Bad time?”

  The papers had come only a few minutes before Sachs had shown himself in the door. A mailman with a wet mustache and liner over his cap and squeaking galoshes delivered it from a parcel cart dragging a wheel on a salt grain. He took Foster’s signature on a green tear-off and left him to the look of the fat envelope, and to the moist groan of the wheel retreating along the hall. What lay revealed beneath the easy-tear filament, framed in brackets and declaratory clauses, was divorce—in a brown paper wrapper. It was no filing or prelude, or other measure of procedure; but was, as far as Foster was concerned, an artifact of the state in conclusion—the thing in actual fact. It was Catherine, and purportedly frail baby Pauline as well, suing for divorce; it was a letter bomb with an utterly noiseless detonation stamped in Maryland court, blasting him with a resignation the quality of a foul odor, and spraying him with shrapnel pieces of all his loose conviction and the glass-shard of his lazy certitude. But for all its spontaneous violence, what Foster knew was that there wasn’t even the least surprise in it.

  This is where Sachs found him when he’d come knocking; staring down into the stagnant drift of copy: “Whereas,” it said where his eye had fallen; his arms set heavily to either side: “Whereas.”

  “Bad time?” Sachs had asked, to which Foster had gazed up at him with a searching myopia.

  “I hope’d I’d catch you. Thought I’d bring by my final,” he joked, and snapped the small black drive against Foster’s desk where it clicked beneath the authoritative press of his finger.

  “It’s finished?” Foster had asked when a dim presence of mind had reawakened.

  “You’ll tell me,” Sachs had said. And then with an uncharacteristic glimmer of seriousness, “But, I think it had better be.” His smile had dimmed just then with the brevity of a light passing behind a pole—and then returned. “But it’s everything you asked for. It’s everything we discussed.”

  “Good,” Foster had said. “Good, Jeffrey.” But Sachs had been silently casting his eyes about the room.

  “Should we settle up then?” Foster had offered, guessing at the antidote to his sudden reserve.

  “I would like that very much,” Sachs had said. “It’ll make next semester much more stylishly lubricated.”

  Foster pictured the checkbook then, snugged against a pen in the pocket flap of the briefcase lying at the corner of the desk: “My checkbook’s at the house,” he’d said. “Can we meet for it?” He wasn’t entirely sure why he’d forestalled the payment, beyond reflex: that and an uncertainty about paying at all. Nevertheless, the moment had served up the small gratification of striking out against his own obedient resignation. Admittedly it wasn’t much—a needle rather than a blow—but it pleased him just the same to let some of the air out; to bleed off some of that overabundant youth, to poultice that unchecked enthusiasm with a bit of salt, and to see the vague illness of disappointment settle over his features with the dissipating waste of aging.

  “That’s fine,” Sachs had said, glancing at the briefcase.

  “I’ll treat you to some of those beers you like.”

  “You mean the ones that come in glasses. I should be getting on.”

  “I’ll walk with you,” said Foster, and brushed the thumb drive and legal declarations into the mouth of his briefcase.

  Outside on the cold-gritted path, where it was the uniform afterglow of day at mid afternoon, they were both intent on the tread of their step and the pinwheel of their breath. “This is my stop,” Sachs had said, and with a lift of his pale hand turned off along a fork in the way.

  But now Foster set alone in the hall, set deep in its bowels, gazing up along the dark rows of seating: the passenger compartment. In a few minutes the doors would burst open in a frenzy of caffeine and
rumpled papers, moist noses and satcheled computers still warm to the touch. The first would hunt to flip on the lights, the next would file into their single-seat pews, and eventually Foster himself would amble to the podium and begin his sermon. But right now his mind seemed a pocket lining with the stitching coming free; he was heartsick, not for Catherine or Pauline, or himself, but for the first sense of a destiny apart from this one—small and far away, but whole; and presently setting its ember below the horizon. I’m rotting, he thought, and laughed into the silence. I’m rotting.

  5.

  Kashkin’s was a slippery-looking leather chair that while not fine, nevertheless looked dear. Two banks of shelves sagged beneath the collective weight of legal volumes; the desk was an old piece of Steelcase three of four full incarnations beyond original use, and behind him were displayed six framed certificates without a common level or square among them. But it was the potted jade at the corner of the desk where Foster’s gaze had come to fall. It was a place for his eyes unselfconsciously to rest, and so they had, his head hard-set in the crook of his palm.

  “Principally, lunch,” answered Pavel Kashkin. “A delicious chicken salad is among God’s pleasures. Also, sometimes I buy their meats, which are quite fine.”

  Foster’s question: ‘What do you buy at Straubs?’ had been launched before it had even fully formed, an utterance fired bolt-action from the thought, and now blinking dully at the wilted jade, Foster held a vague dread for the meandering, lugubrious reply. Foster had seen Kashkin, it seemed, three times in the last few weeks: first at the local grocery deliberating over box cereal, Kashkin had come gliding down the aisle to the ring of his empty cart; next, in line at the coffee house on Maryland, he’d been chatting up a tight skirt arrangement a few places back: twice it had been properly cold, and twice Kashkin had worn nothing heavier than a corded sweater. And then at Straubs, Kashkin had wandered past as Foster stood gloomily turning avocadoes, which like all his other vegetables were fated to desiccate in the eternal night of the crisper drawer.

  “But otherwise,” concluded the Russian, “who has need for eight dollar toothbrushes? There are humbler places to waste one’s money, and grander things upon which to do it.”

  Kashkin was peering down onto the papers, adjusting the spectacles creeping along his nose with the back of his thumb. He swiped the tip of his thick forefinger against his tongue when he lifted pages, and did the same with his pen tip wherever he came upon the space for a signature. His top button and tie were loose. He wore beads of sweat fixed against his brow with an unmoving permanence. And he cast a scent of boiled cabbage in his wake each time he took to the copier in the hall.

  “Do you always lick your pen?” asked Foster, shifting his gaze from the plant.

  Kashkin peeked up at Foster, and at the pen. “Who licks their pen?” he asked.

  “You’ve just done it five times.”

  “So sure?” asked Kashkin, but Foster held the same bland gaze he’d been plying on the potted jade.

  “Perhaps,” Kashkin relented. “A ballpoint is dimwitted cold. Where I spent my boyhood, a dab of warmth here and there lent fluency. That must be it,” he said when he’d returned to the papers.

  “Have you been married?” asked Foster, adjusting his briefcase between his heels.

  “He who retrieves mines has no taste for laying them. No,” said the Russian. “There are some dishes for which knowing the meat spoils the flavor.”

  “You say you have a daughter?”

  “I do,” said Kashkin. “You have the declarations?”

  Foster probed about beneath the flap of his briefcase.

  “And the electronic signature?”

  “There’re both here; and a hard copy of the declarations, as well,” said Foster, and lay a jump drive and file folder together on his desk.

  “The electronic signature? It’s here?” Kashkin asked while stubbing the drive with the blunt of his finger.

  “And a copy of the declarations,” said Foster.

  “And there is the retainer.”

  “Is that now?” asked Foster. A humor was intended for the question, but none came.

  “It is,” replied Kashkin, and flashed a brief and yellow smile at Foster.

  It had been following their third encounter that Foster came upon the card snared in a fold of the paper rose, lifted from the breast pocket of a suit jacket, a bit of flotsam on a lure: Pavel Kashkin, Tower and Gradzik. It was a convenience, true; but the real allure lay in evading his parents—slipping the family attorney, his parent’s reflexive alliance with Catherine, the impossibility of the conversations, and in the end, the peril of their contagious doubt, which he could neither afford, nor had the certainty to visit. Nevertheless, as Foster prepared a check and looked on the withering jade with the bored fixity of a schoolboy in a sentenced waiting, he couldn’t help but wonder if it was a mistake—if Kashkin, with his yellow smile, and his dewy brow, and his straining yoke of a collar, was a mistake.

  Foster leaned in toward the jade and its odd, crescent, half-eaten looking pedals. At the lightest touch one came away in the dirt. “What does that?” he asked.

  “Time,” said Kashkin, glancing up. “Atmosphere, neglect, and over care.”

  “Is it too much water or not enough?”

  “Yes,” replied the Russian. “But mostly it is ambition. Plants are most ambitions of all the creatures.” Foster looked at him doubtfully, but he continued. “They will fill the pot until there is not a granule of earth besides, leaving nothing that sustains—just themselves and the creak of their belt. Only a touch of death will chasten them.”

  To Foster the plant looked modest for its pot: “Then what does this one want?” he asked.

  “The forest,” answered Kashkin.

  6.

  The Grand Basin was still. The fountains did not run, and the water was flat and smooth when the breeze lifted its fingers. The museum sat atop the steep, smooth crest of the rise to their right. The sun shone small and sharp from their left. And they faced the wind which watered their eyes, and the great, white stone balustrade which encircled the near whole of the basin, and they sat on a bench of timber and stone, and their nervous feet ground loudly in the gravel when they moved. Foster thought there would be ice in the water, but there was not.

  Foster closed the newspaper on his knee once more, and noticed the perfect, round blood drop which had formed there. When he tested his nostril with his thumb there was blood there too. He cleaned his fingers against the cuff of his pant leg and tipped his head back pinching the bridge of his nose, and the light through his eyelids was a flaming orange. “I told you in the beginning I had people who could do it,” said Foster. “But I didn’t want to use them—I said. You said you had experience. You said it wasn’t a problem.”

  The man beside Foster was silent. When he opened his eyes the man looked away, through the pillars of the balustrade and into the green murk of the basin. Foster dabbed at his nose again with a pinch. “You and your boys have made a long night of the last week,” he said.

  “If you’d had a better option, you’d better had used it,” said the man. He was called August, or that’s what Foster was to call him. His head was pale and smooth, skimmed to the bone and leaving little but an abrasive gray shade for hair, which joined with his beard like a hood. He wore a black flight jacket and a knitted cap he’d removed when he sat down with Foster, and now turned it over in his hands. In the still air, Foster could see faint thermals—the steam shimmer of expiration—taking up from his scalp. He looked cold, but like a man who’d worn the feeling before and knew its fit. And though Foster couldn’t pin it exactly, there was a slightly mentholated Kentucky or Tennessee swerve in his speech. “How well do you know this man?” he asked.

  It was a question almost without an answer, and one which cast Foster headlong into a cycle of recollection he�
�d been replaying near constantly the whole of the week. The imagery fell into gestures, a series of innocuous tableaus, but their memory was etched with the inalterable certainty of a photographic plate:

  He was at home; the overgrown Tudor on Greenway which he’d bought for himself, and Catherine, and baby Pauline—three stories and eight bedrooms of the lifestyle to which they’d become accustomed—now an oppressively empty architectural set piece held in eternal suspense. It was a late morning quivering near the tail end of the Christmas break—a Christmas marked by the sprit of rations from the freezer drawer, a chalky punctuation of Baileys and crème, a persisting scent of paper rose, and the sigh of damp fire logs in the grand mantle. He’d stood on the third floor in the door of the nursery. There was a crib, still, tied with decorative bumpers, a stack of unfolded boxes, and an ironing board leaning against the closet as something tossed in a gale. He’d stood with his acid-black coffee from the kitchen, and his robe, and looked. He’d shuffled down the broad stair for breakfast: a plate of pan-grease with bacon and egg he’d slumped over at the dining table with his laptop. He’d prepared the signature documents, he’d suffered through the declarations pages, he’d sniffed vigorously from the paper rose, and by the time he lifted his wristwatch by the strap, he’d forty-five minutes between the appointment and himself. Three identical thumb drives lay at the mouth of his briefcase; he plugged one in, migrated the files to the drive, bathed, dressed, collected his things, and left for Kashkin’s office when the meeting was ten minutes old. These were the motions, and they advanced in his memory with the reliability of a flipbook. A half-week had passed before he realized his mistake.