Big Machine

by Victor Lavalle

  All this distance because of Violet’s broken heart? Nah. Violet felt rejected, sure, but she recovered soon enough. Even the other women let it pass eventually. The distance between me and the others solidified because I never explained myself. People can put up with a jerk, but not some nut who might flip on them inexplicably. It’s just not worth the hassle.

  The Gray Lady was still around too, but she stayed solitary. I hadn’t heard the squeak of her shoes in the Library hall for many months. I would’ve thought she was dead if I hadn’t seen the small garbage bin next to her cabin fill up every week.

  So that morning I woke up feeling sour. I wasn’t having sex, wasn’t even masturbating anymore. It had been well over a year without a climax now, not a single tug, and as a result I didn’t need an alarm clock to wake me. Not since I had all this excess energy gobbed up inside. If you’d attached jumper cables to my fingers, I could’ve started a car.

  I left for work alone at six, instead of at eight with the other Scholars. I felt wrecked. It was only October, but it had snowed heavily the night before, so me and the other Scholars had been out plowing our pathways at midnight. You had to do it that way. If you left the snow until morning, you wouldn’t be able to open your door. The guards had all gone home. We only had one snowblower and two shovels between us, so we’d worked together clearing one path, then the next. It was the most time I’d spent with them in months.

  Doing the shoveling ourselves taught us why the Dean never had the front steps of the Washburn Library cleared in winter. There was a grand entrance, with a set of wide stairs leading to a bank of frosted doors, but during a blizzard you could waste hours clearing that whole side, or just a half hour digging out paths to the modest side entrance. By summer we’d all become pretty used to coming and going through the metal door. I’d skipped up the front stairs a couple of times in May and June, but really just for the novelty.

  I’D BEEN IN MY OFFICE for an hour when one of the Library’s guards, a kid named Connor, brought me the day’s newspapers. A stack of twelve. I felt more comfortable with all the Library routines. In recent months, we’d even been given access to the Library’s trucks and finally been allowed to borrow the keys and drive ourselves around. A sign of trust. And do you know, to my knowledge, none of us broke the social contract? Folks might go down into Burlington for groceries or just to eat dinner in a town, around new people, but no one returned with anything toxic as far as I knew. This was a different life indeed.

  I thanked Connor and took the newspapers, laid them on top of my computer monitor. Then I opened the top drawer of my desk. Do you know that in all those months I’d never returned that very first Scholar’s file? The one I’d grabbed on my night alone after Violet had figured out our job. I liked to take it out every few weeks and go through the contents. Reading through it reminded me of how little I knew back then, and how much more confident I felt with the work now. That packet had become my most regular companion.

  I took out a microcassette deck, used it to play and replay one of the cassettes that had been in the file. It was a stream of audible noises recorded in a South Bronx parking garage six years before. Most of the sounds were what you’d expect: a faint wind, outside traffic—maybe a car horn or children shouting as they walked by. At times a door slammed, indicating, I assumed, someone entering or leaving that floor of the garage.

  But there, moments after the door, as if triggered by the door, a voice.

  Young, male, repeating himself. What did he say?

  I had more than just the cassette to work with. There were extensive photos of the stairwell, and pages of handwritten notes. The pictures and sounds had been captured by an Unlikely Scholar named Gartrelle Meadows.

  The original article, from the New York Post, read: CHILD’S CRIES HEARD IN PARKING GARAGE. The Scholar who’d clipped it had written a name at the bottom, but it was illegible.

  Since I still hadn’t met the Scholars in the field, I tended to read a lot into little things. Like how Mr. Meadows wrote in tiny script. Or that he tried to capture the sounds he heard on paper. “BAMM!” for the door. “SEEPSEEPSEEP” for some birds. This came across as half-conscientious and half-bonkers, and I liked him even more for it. I wondered what kind of life he’d led before coming to the Library. Arsonist? Strong-armed robber? I remember my surprise when it turned out both Euphinia and Grace had been in trouble for identity theft. The first in Texas and the second in Michigan. Those two old ladies! They’d acted like they couldn’t turn on a computer. Come to find out they once sold credit card info to the same cartel in Estonia.

  The slam of the door played on the tape again, and seconds later the voice croaked once more. A single word, not much louder than a whisper, but definitely there.

  What did all this stuff really mean? At some point this file had gone up to the Dean’s office, but I couldn’t imagine what he’d done with it. Was there some secret code? What mattered and what didn’t? I’d become tired of simply clipping articles. I wanted to understand the larger design.

  The slam of the stairwell door played, and I leaned into the machine, my ear against the speaker the way one person listens to another’s heartbeat.

  And this time it seemed as though the voice was right there, in my office. Like there was a boy on the floor behind me. Gasping. His moldering hand stretched toward the cuff of my pants. Hoping to turn me around. To make me understand.

  Electricity. That’s what the voice said.

  Electricity. I wrote that word on a scrap of paper for the hundredth time.

  19

  AFTER FLIPPING OFF THE CASSETTE TAPE, I scrutinized the morning’s papers. Most people begin on page one, but I didn’t read them that way anymore. I wasn’t after dispatches about the big events. I began at the back end, reading the stuff some editor had crammed beside the classifieds. For us the greatest gain came from the smallest features. What others threw away, we savored.

  As I reached the front page of The Washington Post, the news turned to the war in Iraq, as it must. Two and a half years of fighting and many more to go. And yet, even though I pawed through a dozen papers each day, it actually became easier to forget the war as I read more. Thirty-five casualties one day, and a bomb killed twenty-four the next. But I’ve never known a statistic that actually touched my heart.

  I brushed my fingers over the latest headline.

  Then the door to my office opened and I nearly fell out of my chair. I’d been concentrating a little too hard on the image of a charred van. Could I really see bodies inside? I was so startled by the noise at the door that the pages in my hand rose with me. I clutched them automatically. Spun around to see who it was and moved so quick that I tore the newspaper in two. One war in my left hand and another in my right. The snap sounded like a pistol had gone off in the little room.

  Lake stood in the doorway.

  Or I should say that he twisted so he could fit his shoulders through the door. I hadn’t spoken to him much in the months since our tour. Hardly ever saw him around. He wasn’t a security guard and wasn’t staff. The Scholars joked that he didn’t actually work for the Library, he was really an ambassador from the woods all around us, a dignitary from that foreign land.

  “Mr. Rice,” Lake said, but nothing more.

  Was he taking attendance?

  The offices of the other Scholars were lit up brightly by now. I hadn’t noticed, but they’d made it to their desks. They must all have stopped their work, though, must’ve been watching my door, because Lake hadn’t come down our hall since the morning he’d congratulated Violet.

  Lake’s glassy eyes scanned the room.

  “You’ve been called up,” he said.

  I turned and looked at the phone on my desk, but it hadn’t rung once all day.

  “Who called me?”

  Lake stepped into the room entirely, and I moved five steps back, pressed against the far wall. The man was as wide as my desk.

  “You don’t understand,” he
said. “You’ve been called up. To see the Dean.”

  “How can that be?” I asked, without meaning to.

  “Only the Dean can tell you,” Lake said.

  With those words my suit shrank and I felt warmer. The glass wall of my office seemed to bend in the light. Had I begun to glow? How else to explain the heat in my eyes? Tears? All six of my former friends stepped out into the hallway now. I didn’t want them to watch, and I wanted them to see everything. I didn’t know what to do, jump around or faint, so instead I shook Lake’s hand.

  Now, you have to understand, the man didn’t have his hand out. Those big paws of his rested calmly at his sides. I wonder if Lake thought I was going to tackle him. He must’ve been a little shocked, because when I grabbed his hand, he burped. Just a little noise, out of his lungs, that he couldn’t stop. I grabbed one of his meaty hands with both of mine and shook double extra hard.

  “That’s great,” I said. “Just great.”

  Lake didn’t smile exactly. His big red face stayed largely the same, but he didn’t seem angry either. Not until he looked at his hand and saw the little gray splotches on his skin. I saw them too. The ink from the newspapers, all those headlines, had stained my fingertips, and now I’d dirtied his hand.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  He raised one finger and shook it at me. “That’s just the price of contact.” He added, “Tomorrow morning I’ll come for you.”

  Lake turned to leave the room, and the other Unlikely Scholars hopped back to their offices. Light doesn’t travel as fast as they did. Instantly they were tapping at their keyboards and whiffling through newsprint. Lake knocked on the glass of my office as he strolled off. “Wash your hands,” he shouted, and then went on.

  I MUST’VE BEEN LEFT ALONE for a little while, but I couldn’t remember the passage of time. Lake went away, and then, next in my memory, the other Unlikely Scholars crowded round. But my hands were clean, so I’d gone down the hall to the coffee room and washed them, but when?

  “He’s still shaking,” Verdelle said. She stooped a little to look into my face, but spoke to the others.

  “His eyes are even shaking,” Peach Tree said.

  “Can I get his stapler when he leaves?” Euphinia asked. “They never gave me one.”

  “If she gets the stapler, I need the toner cartridge out his printer,” Grace added.

  Finally I got back to the ground floor.

  “Hey,” I whispered. “I’m right here.”

  “No you’re not,” Violet said.

  Called up to meet the Dean.

  Peach Tree said, “I guess you won.”

  At which point the women looked at Violet.

  “Ain’t that something,” Grace muttered.

  Verdelle whispered, “Yeah, the same old thing.”

  Things might’ve gone badly just then. Violet put her hand on the back of my neck. I waited for her to scratch the skin off.

  Instead she said, “We’re going to have a dinner tonight. A nice one. A real send-off. For our friend.”

  Verdelle and Sunny, Euphinia and Grace, they watched Violet’s mouth.

  “You sure?” Sunny asked.

  Violet took off her glasses, rubbed her right eye, paused a moment. “I am.”

  Peach Tree hit my shoulder, as if he felt relieved.

  “She’s got the right idea. That’s how they used to do it in the way back when.”

  “That’s how who used to do it?” I asked, watching Violet cautiously.

  “Human beings,” Peach Tree said. “I’m talking about the first, first times.”

  A feast, I thought. Where you toast and ask the Heavens for luck.

  “We should have it at my cabin,” I told him.

  “Well, where else we going to do it?” Peach Tree asked. “You think I’m going to clean up my place for you?”

  Euphinia said, “We should all bring something.”

  Each Unlikely Scholar shook my hand and left.

  I stood still for twenty minutes more.

  With the rest of my afternoon I went over Gartrelle Meadows’s file again, the sound on the stairs. Electricity. Electricity. I felt a bit of that myself. The next morning it would be my turn. At four o’clock I sent the last report of my life up to the Dean.

  Then I borrowed a truck, drove up to Newport, and spent most of my money on a treat for the feast.

  20

  AS I CLEANED MY CABIN, a great wind bruised the walls. It made a steady stomp against the roof and threw snow at all my windows. Winter in Vermont. I already knew it well.

  At seven the Unlikely Scholars arrived together.

  Carrying dishes of this and that, the same old stuff as always, but it didn’t look the same. Even a bowl of mashed potatoes became whipped ambrosia.

  We had a tuna casserole, homemade buttermilk biscuits, sweet potatoes, and even lobsters. A wild mix of food, right? But it seemed appropriate. We were a wild mix of people. Most of us were missing a couple of teeth somewhere in our mouths. Our fingertips showed scars and hardened skin from the years of cradling hot glass pipes. We bumped around one another, elbows and hips, as we set the table. But there wasn’t as much chatter as I remembered from months before.

  When we finally sat for the meal, it felt like a wake. Knives and forks clacking, cups thumping as they were set back down on the dining table. Our utensils were louder than us. We ate like that until our plates were clean.

  Before anyone considered seconds, I left the room. When I returned from the bedroom, the other Unlikely Scholars eyed me cautiously. But I didn’t want them watching me so I shook what was in my hands.

  We’d been there nine months. Nine months of water and juice, tea and coffee, all the soda you might like. But not this. Not one glass of wine. From the hush you would’ve thought I’d just returned from the top of Mount Sinai. I shook the bags, full of reds, again. They were as heavy as stone tablets.

  “Ricky,” Violet whispered. “Everything’s forgiven.”

  TWO HOURS LATER and we were singing at the table. Humming at least. Peach Tree doing a little Al Green while I tapped my chair to give him a beat, but I was thinking of the wrong song and messed him up. He got angry, just a flare-up, a minute of shouting that passed. None of us held it against him.

  We were down to the last two bottles of Shiraz. Most of the food gone. I’ll say this about us. We looked silly.

  Each of us wore these fine Washburn outfits. Verdelle a two-piece twill cord “tailleur” suit, and Peach Tree a herringbone tweed three-piece. Sunny came in a men’s gray worsted wool suit and hadn’t removed her jacket throughout the meal. Euphinia and Grace wore matching evening gowns of chenille brocaded crêpe. And Violet looked almost sporty in a three-piece knickers suit. And yet, with all this finery, we looked a little foolish because we’d tucked paper towels into our collars like bibs.

  And I don’t mean one paper towel either. I’m talking about three or four, hanging down to our waists. You’d have thought we were in barber’s chairs. But what else were we going to do? I’m not the only one who thought the Library might ask us to return the duds one day. And I did not want to get charged on some cleaning fee.

  I uncorked the last two bottles and moved around the table, a bit wobbly. I poured out generous doses, then returned to my seat. The kitchen clock read ten past ten, but it felt later. Liquor turns some folks giddy, while others get aggressive. And it makes some people reminisce.

  Euphinia said, “I got caught up in some trouble down in Victoria, Texas, two years ago. Did an account takeover on a couple, the easiest kind of ID theft. But I guess they lost their house over the debts. By the time I got caught, they were living out of their car. They tracked me down on the morning I made bail.”

  She sipped her wine.

  “I had my money tucked in a bank in Houston, so I stepped out my arraignment at the Victoria County Courthouse and got right on Route 59. I figured I’d close out the account in Houston, then disappear. Had to go do it in person bec
ause no ATM spits out that much cash. I’m not on the road more than a few miles when this couple I’d cheated rolls up alongside me. I didn’t know them, never saw their faces before, but I could tell they knew who I was. I was the Devil, as far as they were concerned.”

  We were so used to snowstorms by this time that we hardly flinched when my cabin’s windows rattled. Outside, it sounded as if the woods themselves were running headfirst into my house. The walls groaned from another tackle.

  Euphinia said, “It’s not the first time I got found. I pulled onto the shoulder, and they stopped just ahead. I’d offer them some money if they’d follow me to Houston, just enough to make us even. They climbed out the car, this Mexican couple, calm as clams. I rolled down my window to talk, and before I even open my mouth, that man lifts the lock and opens my door. Pushes right inside! So I scramble to the passenger side, best I could, but there’s the wife. She’s blocking the door with her hip. And while I’m looking at her, the man punches me in the back of the head. Kept hitting me until I just passed out.”

  Euphinia stopped and sighed, dropped her chin to her chest. She spoke quietly now.

  “You ever been in the south Texas desert? I smelled salt water coming up from the gulf, but I saw desert scrub and twisted acacia. It was like my nose and eyes weren’t in the same territory. I got confused. And then this heat, this dry, dry heat. That couple dumped me and ran. I didn’t see them. No cars. I found tire tracks and tried to follow them, but pretty soon I couldn’t see straight. I was just wandering to death.

  “Then I look up and I see all these birds, different kinds, circling and circling a spot up ahead. I figured that meant water. By the time I got there, I was practically crawling. I didn’t have much strength. And when I got there, the birds didn’t even scatter like birds do. They kept circling, or they perched in the brush and they watched me stagger. They kept chirping. All of them. So many, and so loud, I covered my ears. And finally I found a deep ditch, but there wasn’t any water in it. There was a body, lying on its back. It was my own grandson.”