Equipment

by Hesse Caplinger

  But he was startled to find that he was wrong. He had not forged new chemical bonds; he had not worried nerve roots and crystallizing chains into the pool. He could not feel its volumes, and the pool was not empty. Foster was yet to throw his first overhand crawl—had yet to turn the first lap in his forty-minute program—when a man emerged from the far end of the pool. He rose sudden and unaccountably from the depth: to Foster, not violent, but swift and eerily. From the furthest marine-shaded deep, he rose, and slung a dive weight onto the pool deck and pushed back close hair. He cleared his nostrils and read time from a dive watch. He set the bezel with a faint but perceptible ratchet, and he climbed out. He was not lean, but muscular. Foster thought: hardened. He said nothing to Foster, but left. And as he left, Foster noticed a substantial bruise against his right inner shoulder. It looked purple and yellow and green: some brief, localized punishment. When the man had gone Foster began his routine, began his laps and forward crawl; kicked off from the poolside, and tried to resume his optimistic reflections. Unspent cash in bands at home. Himself, sitting down at the computer. Sailing to class in the morning and returning home enlivened and ready to work; to write inspired and effective code. Kim Soong, in a few hours time. And he reflected again on the bruise; the man’s bruise. His musculature wasn’t gym fluffed, it wasn’t swollen and watery, but seemed labor-wizened: calcified; permanent. Foster thought of his own welts; the angry marks on his side and abdomen from his collapse against the gun; the box of shells. Marks of mania and folly. The man’s bruise stood out to him in relief, and the more he thought of his own fleshy wounds, the more this was so. He lay back into the cloistered shadow of his mind. Swam laps: forward crawl; breaststroke; backstroke—in their turn; climbed his fluid advance. And when his mind surfaced from these silences, he thought of the paper rose. He thought he’d resolve not to visit it the rest of the day—one full calendar day away from the florist. Just this one, and then tomorrow he would remeasure. And the bruise. It kept rising to mind like the recurring form in a kaleidoscope. The mind returned to it; to it, to his own welts, and by them back again. He’d fallen on the gun: they were gun welts: marks of an instrument. He kept working this ground, passing over it again and again, and despite forty minutes swimming, couldn’t make the ends join. It was much less a thought than an emotion, and as Foster finished his swim; climbed from the pool to his towel, his clinging shirt, and slick bathing shoes—this emotion rang discordantly. It hove like some formless pall above his daylight cheer and deliberated optimisms.

  He left the pool, turned the sweating handle, traipsed again past the front desk, pushed open the metal flange of door, and thread down along the narrow crook of passage to the locker room. And then he stopped mid-stride. A shotgun; a rifle: it was a shooting bruise. How simple could he be: a shooting bruise. Of course, a shooting bruise. Charles Foster thought this just as the man from the pool appeared in the passage. He was dressed, in heavy sober clothes, with a towel over his arm, and leaving. He entered from the opposite end. He moved quickly and closely past him, brushed him in fact, and it was not until he’d exited, firmly out through the swinging metal door, that Foster noted the pain in the back of his thigh.

  XII.

  The television was wood-print decal and aerials to catch echoes of the universe and course-grain static—a diarist reliquary in three-color radio. On it, Lleyton Hewitt clapped the ball overhand and shuffled crabwise. Airline engine howl poured into the stadium and eventually passed in fine Doppler thread. Far court Roger Federer launched left and right with volleys. LeFrance thought he moved like an old Pong curser: back and forth on a track, an Atari paddle in white pixels and headband. The court might have been any color, but the screen shown only in blue-green, gray, and white—somewhere a reality in high-vis felt and grunting ball boys, rendered for LeFrance in Eastern Bloc pointillism. And like his bracelet Timex, it too was inheritance. The watch: a cigar-box heirloom from his grandfather; the television, a gift in refuse from his mother. It sat on a moving box with a casual lean and the girl watched it from the mattress. She lay on her chest and her elbows, feet up at the knee, and she watched it. She watched it under the terms of affectionate communion. And from the doorframe Edmund LeFrance watched it too.

  LeFrance had stood in his t-shirt, his pajama pants, his flip-flops—whose clapping followed him everywhere about the house like the nick of animal claws—and had stood at the window over the sink. The girl, his lover, had rung repeatedly to stay, to visit. She missed him. Couldn’t she come?—why couldn’t she come?—and he wanted her to. He wanted her company and had longed to have it for days, despite telling her whatever might be necessary to keep her away. He wanted her compassion and body-volume of heat and her black frame glasses and her heavy eyes when she smiled and her strange fluid bearing when she did not and he wanted her emotional binding. These were the dressings which healthy men sought, and these were the dressings whose administration kept him so. It was a vitamin, a mineral, an electrolyte to fire the senses—a hormone supplement to render coherence and use of the various and contrary parcels of man. LeFrance had seen the new men—wispy and louche, anatomical and ungendered—and the women who wanted them. But what he knew was that for men like him, bearing an authentic woman along his way was the final condition of man’s prime—whether pelts and cudgels or courts and daggers, she is a hearth of her own; woman is the azimuth of man. And so he had told her to leave, had stayed her for days, and relented late last night—just and only late last night—when his want and his worry bore that temporary clearance of strike-plate and latch. LeFrance had stood in the kitchen and rolled a cigarette and lit it on the stove and ashed into the sink and stare through the window into the long grass of the back yard and he’d thought about the man at the bar, and how to ask her to leave.

  He’d eaten greens from the bag and taken a Corona from the fridge loosely by the neck, and accompanied by the clap of his flip-flops, he’d returned to smoke in the doorway and watch the Indian Wells tournament and ask her to leave and wonder if he’d work out how to do it beforehand. She’d slipped in late last night and had been happy, and he’d been happy too. But it troubled his intuition—this lapse—and had all the afterglow of mistake. It was too soon: phobia or no, reasonable or no—too soon.

  Hewitt knitted his face in the hem of his jersey, and LeFrance said, “I was glad to have you here.”

  “You were,” she said. She rolled on her side and stretched a languid arm for the beer. She was handed it, drank from it, and returned it. “And you’re not now?”

  “I was. I was glad to see you. Glad that you came, and I look forward to seeing you again. Soon.”

  She reached for the bottle again and was handed it. She studied LeFrance, checked him above her glasses and through them again, pulled comparative focus on him—and when he reached to retrieve the bottle, lifted a searching hand for it—she said, “Get your own.”

  “I’m not trying to be clever about it. I have some things I need to do,” he said. He smoked and searched for a place to ash. Failing to find one, he ashed in his palm—made a fist as though to perform magic on a coin, and then opened it to observe the residual grey smudge of his conjuration.

  “You said you’ve been to the casino all week,” she said.

  “I did.”

  She motioned to the pair of chips at the bedside. “This your booty? Maybe you’ve done plenty. A week on life-support over a stool—burned through whatever to keep that…pair of chips…and you want to toss me to fix the image; mark the occasion? Make it better?”

  “There’s more than that.”

  “How much you down?”

  “They don’t let me tell,” he said, and brushed out the cigarette in the smudge of his hand, and then clutched it in a fist as before. “It’s a few days. That should sort it.”

  “It was a few days before. This is the final: can we just watch the final?”

  She looked away to the
match, and looked back, and he shook his head.

  “It was a few days before, and it was a few days too soon.”

  “The final,” she repeated.

  “You’re not watching the final, I am. And I have to go, and so do you.”

  “But we could.”

  “We can’t.”

  “But we should.”

  “Yes. We should. But we won’t.”

  “Is there a problem?”

  “You took my beer.”

  “Do you have a problem?”

  “That it’ll be a few more days before I can see you.”

  “You’re terrible.”

  “You should see the view in here—it’s goddamn panoramic.”

  “You’re a liar,” she said, and she took a deep slug off the bottle.

  “I am. The worst. But you gotta go.”

  “Now?”

  “Or sooner,” he said, and he watched her climb out of the bed and stand before him to finish the bottle. She put on pants and shirt and shoes and a flimsy coat.

  “Times like this . . .” she said and opened the door.

  “Cause I’m so good to you.”

  “You are?”

  “As the Maharaja to all his harem. And possibly his wives, too.”

  “I’m not kissing you,” she said going down the front stair. And then stopped, and climbed the stair again to kiss him.

  “Maybe what?” LeFrance had asked. He’d sat at the bar, belly to the brass at the Delmar Lounge, and had drunk the man’s Oban, and the man had said—“Though I think you may be.”

  “Maybe what?” he’d said.

  “A literate sort,” the man had said.

  “I don’t think so,” LeFrance had muttered. His mouth was dry and his throat, inexplicably hoarse, and he’d croaked out as though whispering into vacuum.

  “The Rilke says otherwise. Or that was just laying about,” the man had said.

  LeFrance had lit his cigarette with the man’s lighter and been turning it over in his hands, and noticed the snare, the barb, the mar in the finish that felt like a kind of tragedy for so fine a thing; and at the remark on Rilke he’d felt himself touching the chapbook and envelope with his forearm: adjusting them, bracing them.

  The man uncurled his palm to LeFrance, into which he’d replaced the lighter; and trimmed his ash, LeFrance had thought, with a remote and automatic care—a motion like a draftsman lathing his pencil lead—and had repositioned the lighter with a squaring precision beside the remaining cigarette.

  “It’s beautiful,” he’d said.

  “It was.”

  “You dropped it.”

  “I never did. It was a gift—and dropped the once,” said the man. “Ignorance is hazard to perfection, time is hazard to order; and to beauty: use.”

  LeFrance had smoked and watched the man drink and stare at him, disarmed and discomforted; as though his vision were troubled—not as though it was blurred, but as though the object of focus were: as though he couldn’t make it sharp; as though he couldn’t understand what it was. “And you are…whom?” he asked, at last.

  “Arbeit,” said the man. “Only and ever, Arbeit. But I tire quickly to talk of myself. You are…a native. How do you find it? Speaking…as a native.”

  “How do I find it, here? St. Louis? Like everyone else: without a seat when the music stops.” LeFrance had smoothed his bald crown in a self-placating gesture that failed to serve. “And how does it find you?” he’d asked.

  “Like a spirit distilled from its own hangover,” said the man, and they both shared a brief and uneasy laughter.

  LeFrance smothered his cigarette in the ashtray, and the man had looked at him for what seemed a long and unnatural time. The look was not stern, but hard, he’d thought, not antagonistic, but predatory—something loading forward onto haunches.

  “Should we have another?” said the man. He’d drawn up the last cigarette from his arrangement and offered it to LeFrance. “Make it an even six. Breach protocol…just the once.”

  LeFrance had grown clammy and disoriented. The moisture, from his esophagus to his lips, seemed all at once to have vanished. It wasn’t fear—or he thought it wasn’t fear—but some coiling uncertainty. This character—this man, he couldn’t read or understand him. LeFrance couldn’t reconcile whether he was eccentric, dangerously authentic, or if he was just terminally strange. His speech was uncommon and his bearing was uncommon and his statements were uncommon, and his intention seemed simultaneously saw-toothed and inscrutable, as though somewhere an imperceptible low-pressure of menace had rolled in about him. He thought his ears might pop. It was a feeling with a touch of the apartment in it: something overwhelming.

  “I’m fine, thank you,” LeFrance had said. It was an answer to a question which now felt muted and far away: long ago. Imaginary. “Excuse me for a moment.”

  “Of course,” said the man.

  LeFrance drank and scooped the chapbook and envelope into his coat pockets and stood.

  “Of course,” said the man.

  LeFrance had turned down the hall for the restrooms and out of view. He’d forced open the men’s room with the flat of his hand, and it struck off the stop and fell hard closed. He’d backed slightly up the hall and through the service door into the kitchen. The staff had looked up from their stove burners and dish tubs and their pickup shelves, from their smoking into the exit-draft of the fire door opened to an alley-court of dumpsters and dolly trucks. “Scotch and pasta—end of the bar. Didn’t see the bartender,” said LeFrance to the server at pickup, and stuffed a new hundred in his breast pocket. “Good food. Bad company,” he’d said, and slipped out through the fire door and between the sweating staff and their tobacco, and into the night.

  LeFrance had this and the doings at the apartment fully in mind when he’d first cast her out: asked her to leave days ago—and then again in the morning and then again with a renewed and fortified persistence in the kitchen, eating greens with his fingers and fishing a bottle from the fridge; and now he stood on the stoop in flip-flops and pajama pants with his fist of extinguished cigarette, which he brushed from his palm like discharged moth parts, and he watched her leave. He watched her strike up the little maroon boot of Volvo wagon, and drive away.

  LeFrance washed his hands in the kitchen, and when they still felt gritted he washed them again. He lifted a bottle of beer from the fridge for his own, and dressed. He thought of where to go, what to do in his camouflage of activity; his pretence of idleness—an indolence of one, made virtuous and constructive by company. He dressed in clothes and shoulder harness and Redhawk; top coat and pouch of shag and chapbook and padded envelope; a pair of speed loaders he checked with his hands as they might be car keys and wallet. And then he shuffled in the doorframe and drank the beer and watched the final and waited for the end of service or a commercial interruption or some other natural terminus for redirection. And after a moment, there was a knock at the door.

  Through the peephole there was a girl—a mousy Asian with a black mantle of shoulder-length hair. LeFrance sighed at the door handle and looked again. She was still and slightly off to one side. When he opened the door to the end of the chain, the girl drew up her hair and spoke: “I’m supposed to wait in the car.”

  XIII.

  It drooped from the point of the ornament to the bridge of the hood and with a slack-line ease. A hammock string, he thought, loose fiddle bow. It was a gossamer dragline, a bit of spider filament picked up by the prow of his ship—clipped off by the Daimler star and fluttering in the perfect stillness of light and sky. He urged it to piss off to wind, but none rose and he turned to observe Soong instead.

  He’d waited on Hartford across from Mekong and watched Soong’s gaze tip occasionally over the low bar of curtain and through the window. Divorced from her features, her eyes seemed uniquely gla
zed and expressionless, had that ocular vacancy of fat house pet: illucid and prosthetic. At another time it might have served its own gratifying irritation, but now—at five after the hour—it seemed a punctuation in puerility fanning at his temper. Who wants goddamn Vietnamese in the first place?—thought Hoyt Gamlin—nothing but Chinese food in half-size portions and flavored with napalm and ginger. He’d been waiting an hour in the car staring cross the street at the brow of Kim Soong, when the thought had risen like an irritable smoke ring. “Alright, that’s fucking torn it,” he muttered, and shut off the car and stormed across the street and into the restaurant.

  When she’d seen him coming she shook her head violently through the window and bounced in the booth so that her whole face to the chin might clear the curtain rod. “What? What! What are you doing?” She was nervous and exasperated, her wrists shone a firm, pleading bent, and she looked everywhere about as though the audience might notice Gamlin’s break in character; the director might shout him out of the scene.

  “He’ll see you!”

  “The hell you say.” Gamlin had swung through the door and rolled down the aisle, and stood now simmering beside her table.

  “He will! He’ll see you.”

  “That’s your one line. He’s not coming—let’s go—we’re going.”

  “No, no, he could—he might,” she said. “Leave. You should leave.”

  “Don’t be a twit. He’s onto you, or he’s not—but he’s not coming—and we’re going, now. I’ve enough of this fucking about,” he said. Gamlin reached down and grasped her by the wrist and she collapsed like tent poles, and lifted her out and set her on loosely-hinged feet. “There’s nothing for it. Come, little Soong.”

  Soong had taken the call yesterday. It was Charles Foster, strange and manic, she’d said, and entirely out of thin air. He’d called her for a lunch—offered up the place and time—confirmed it by text: here, Mekong, an hour ago. It was the place they’d met for dinner on the fourteenth, and Soong had narrowed it to the table. She’d set in the same windowpane, and he’d been two cars back on Hartford to see. She’d approached Foster at Gamlin’s urging—wound him up a touch—and watched for the chime. Foster had come, she said he’d been animated, friendly, weaved heavily between topics and grew more emphatic and fidgety, intoxicated and incohesive with each return from the loo. It was inconclusive, and what Gamlin learned from it was he was tiring of waiting in cars, and that Foster profess to pleasures of a Vietnamese cuisine he couldn’t be bothered to touch.