by Pete Nelson
Carl said he would have told Paul sooner but Paul had never shown any interest in such things before. That was true. Carl lectured him about how the market had changed with the Internet, how more information was available now than ever before and more people were playing the market who didn’t know what they were doing, which meant more volume, higher highs, lower lows, a faster, more volatile roller coaster, and more passengers who weren’t wearing their seat belts. Paul read the paper every day but usually skimmed the business section. He knew the market had been wacky, records set every month, with catastrophic corrections and new Black Fridays ever looming. Carl’s argument was that Arnie Olmstead was behind the times and unable to react were something drastic to occur. “We have a responsibility,” Carl had said. Carl’s plan was to manage their father’s investments online, where you could make quick trades without having to pay huge brokers’ fees. “Everybody’s doing it,” he said. He intended to keep everybody informed. “Just let me watch over things for the time being. If you have any doubts as to my ability, you’re free to examine my records anytime you want to.”
“So you wanted to be included, even though you don’t have any money and you don’t care about money and you don’t know anything about the stock market,” Stella said. “I’m not trying to be critical. I’m just trying to keep things in perspective.”
“I appreciate it,” Paul told Stella. “I just don’t trust him. I learned not to. I trusted him before and he screwed me. I swore it wouldn’t happen again.”
“What did he do that makes you not trust him?” Stella asked.
“Where do I start?” Paul said. “Like the time I was at a party and Debbie Benson wanted to go skinny-dipping. That’s where you take off all your clothes and go swimming. Usually at night after you’ve been drinking. It’s supposed to be sexy.”
“It’s not?”
“Not in Minnesota,” Paul said. “Not where there are mosquitoes the size of chickens. Plus the water was freezing cold, which has a nice effect on girls’ bodies but not so much for guys, if you know what I mean.”
Stella looked puzzled again.
“Anyway, I was way past curfew when I got home because I’d been driving around the lakes for an hour so as not to reek of alcohol. I came in and my father was waiting up for me, and he said he wanted to know if I was taking pot. My mom was usually the one who waited up, so I knew it was serious. I said you don’t take pot, you smoke pot. He said, ‘Pot is a drug, is it not? And you take drugs.’ ”
“Alcohol is a drug too, isn’t it?” Stella asked.
“I guess it is, but you don’t say, ‘I take alcohol.’”
“But you do say, ‘I took a drink.’ ”
“I freely admit it was a stupid argument,” Paul said. “But I’m denying up and down to his face, saying I don’t smoke pot and never have, and he pulls out a big old Baggie full of weed and asks me if it’s mine. Which it obviously was, but I’d hidden it under a loose floorboard in the attic that you had to move six huge boxes just to get to, so no way anybody could accidentally find my stash. The only other person in the house who knew about my secret hiding place was guess who? Carl. He narced on me. In my own house. You don’t do that to your brother. You just don’t.”
They were home now. Paul helped Stella out of the car, lifted her up the steps, and set her down on the porch while he unlocked the front door. Inside, he turned up the thermostat, got a beer from the refrigerator, and sat on the couch. Stella took her place on the dog bed by the radiator. Paul picked up the remote control, then decided against watching television.
“I have to say,” Stella said, “I still feel like something else is bothering you. You have that guilty-conscience look.”
“A hangdog look?” he asked.
She’d never cared much for the expression.
“I think maybe I did a bad thing,” he told her.
“What did you do this time?”
He’d asked Carl, once their meeting in his office was over, if he could use his computer to check his e-mail and to see if he could get Tamsen online. She wasn’t online, so he sent her a quick note to tell her that all was well and that he would call her when he got home. He even considered using his brother’s phone to call her. He needed to talk to somebody. He was trying hard to give his brother the benefit of the doubt; yet evil thoughts came to him unbidden. Did he need to protect himself, even if it was only a remote possibility that Carl was going to screw him somehow? Flipping through the Rolodex on Carl’s desk, he found Arnie Olmstead’s telephone number and decided he could at least give Arnie a call to get a second opinion. He needed a pen or a pencil to write the number down.
Carl’s desk drawers were immaculate. The top middle everything drawer, which should have been stuffed to overflowing with miscellaneous crap, was instead neatly organized with plastic sectional dividers, every paper clip in its proper place. He found the pen he was looking for, but he couldn’t resist further investigation. In a deep side drawer, he found what had to be every operations manual and appliance warranty Carl had ever received, stored in alphabetical order. In a drawer below that, of interest, in a protective clear Plexiglas case, was a baseball autographed by Harmon Killebrew, the former Minnesota Twins player who’d been a childhood hero of Paul’s and apparently Carl’s hero as well.
After writing down Olmstead’s number, he was about to log off and rejoin his family downstairs when he saw an icon on Carl’s computer desktop marked “PINs.”
Paul couldn’t believe his brother would be so stupid as to write down his PINs and keep them all in one place. A quick click, though, showed that Carl had multiple PINs. Paul had only one personal identification number, 7285, which was his name if you dialed it on a telephone, and he used that PIN for all his various accounts. Carl’s PINs, his ATM password, his AOL password, others that Paul didn’t recognize, were listed alphabetically, including, after Citibank but before Discover, a PIN labeled “Dad’s Online Portfolio.” It was a relatively simple matter to hit the Print button and make a copy of the list. The bottom line, he’d reasoned, was that if he decided later that it was the wrong thing to do, he could always tear up the copy and undo the transgression, but if it was the right thing to do, he’d never get another chance.
“He said I was free to examine his records anytime I wanted to,” Paul explained to Stella.
“That may be what he said, but I doubt that’s what he meant,” Stella replied. “If you’re asking my opinion.”
“I didn’t exactly think it through,” Paul said.
“Well. You had a lot of other things on your mind,” Stella said. “With your dad in the hospital. You know that in a way, you’re lucky.”
“How am I lucky?”
“Not everybody knows who their father was,” she said. He looked at her.
“German shepherd,” Paul said. “Pretty sure.”
“So you’ve said,” she replied. “I would have liked to know more.”
“I think you put your finger on it,” Paul told her. “I’m not saying I’m not lucky, but I think the hardest part was that I always had this fantasy that one day my dad and I would go fishing or something, and then we’d sit around the fire and drink fifty-year-old Macallan and have some big heart-to-heart. I know who he is, but I don’t feel like I know him. Or actually, it’s more like he doesn’t know me. And now I won’t get another chance.”
“I thought your father doesn’t drink.”
“It’s just a fantasy,” Paul said.
“Are you glad you went home?”
“I suppose so. I couldn’t say for certain if he even knew I was there,” Paul said. “I think I went so I’d get credit for going. Like how you go to funerals because you’re afraid if you don’t, the dead guy’s ghost is going to point his bony finger at you and say, ‘Why weren’t you at my funeral?’ ”
“Well, that’s just silly,” Stella said. “Of course he knew you were there. He’d know it even with his eyes closed.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Well,” Stella said, “I know you’re there when my eyes are closed.”
“How?”
“I don’t know,” Stella said. “I just do. Pheromones. But I’ll bet you if I know, he’d know too. He’s your father.”
He picked up her paw and squeezed it three times.
“Do you know what that is?” he asked her.
“That’s my paw,” she said. “Are you going to tell me another word for part of a chicken?”
“I mean the three squeezes,” Paul said. “It’s a secret signal my mother taught me when we were at the hospital. Three squeezes means ‘I love you.’ I guess they’ve been doing it with each other all their lives, waiting in lines in airports or sitting next to each other at weddings. They’d hold hands and give each other three squeezes. He did it in the hospital, right there while I was saying good-bye. The doctors said it could be a sign that he’s getting better.”
Paul tried to remember the moment he’d held his father’s hand and felt it twitch. Had it twitched once? Twice? Three times perhaps? He couldn’t say.
Part 2
Spring/Summer
Pain is the primary negative reinforcement nature uses to teach the lessons all species need to learn to survive. In a study done at UCLA and at Macquarie University in Australia using brain-scanning technology to observe activation in the brain’s anterior cingulate cortex or pain center, human subjects confronting loneliness or heartache resulting from being excluded from a social group or network experienced pain as real as if their skin were being burned. In other words, the need to belong to a group or to be connected to someone else is fundamental to our survival, so that it is the very pain of heartache that keeps us coming back for more, to make the pain go away.
At the same time, the endorphins released when we’re in love, affecting the pleasure centers in the brain, are known to lower our IQs and inhibit long-term objective memory. Thus we are hardwired to fuck up again and again. Species known to aggregate in social groupings, canids or ungulates, for example, show similar releases of pleasure-giving hormones — endorphins, dopamine, oxytocin, and the like — when aggregated, and similar activities in the anterior cingulate cortex during periods of isolation or separation. Members of the canid species, including dogs and wolves, are second in this regard only to humans. Social animals also tend to exhibit greater temerity and are built more for endurance than nonaggregate species. Dogs and wolves, for example, are believed to have the most efficient cardiovascular systems of all mammals. Wolves regularly hunt down prey faster and stronger than they are simply by outlasting them over great distances, often running up steep hills through heavy snows without tiring. Canadian researchers studying sled dogs attached heart monitors to a team of malamutes and discovered that sled dogs running at top speed could sustain heart rates exceeding 300 beats per minute for hours, a rate once believed possible only in shrews. This does not come as news to dog owners, who already know that no animal has a heart quite like a dog’s. Social animals therefore have high tolerances for both pleasure and pain and can abide fluctuations between the two for long periods of time.
— Paul Gustavson, Nature for Morons
5
Exile in Beersville
Pemmican!” Stella said. “My favorite. Thank you.”
He’d given her the present he’d brought her. The pickin’s for dogs at the Minnesota-themed gift shop at the airport were beyond slim. Every time he flew home, he brought Stella back a bag of Chippewa pemmican, meat cut in strips and dried Native American–style. He’d brought her Slim Jims once but they hadn’t agreed with her. He’d remembered at the last minute to pick up a gift for Tamsen too, rushing through the airport gift shop with five minutes to spare before his flight boarded. Everything on the shelves screamed “I meant to get you a real gift but actually I forgot until I got to the airport.” He had to choose between a ceramic loon, a bottle of maple syrup (but bringing maple syrup home to New England was like carrying coal to Newcastle), a Kirby Puckett bobble-head doll, or a snow globe with Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox inside. He’d settled on the snow globe as having the highest kitsch value.
He showed Stella the snow globe, turning it upside down, then righting it.
“That’s lovely,” she said. “How does it do that?”
“There’s water inside,” he told her.
“Why doesn’t the snow melt?”
“It’s plastic or something,” he said.
“Can I have my pemmican now?”
“Let’s bring it to the Bay State,” he told her. “I’m meeting Tamsen there. You can eat it in the doorway. Just don’t let people see or everybody is going to want some.”
The Bay State Hotel bar was listed in the American Registry of Seedy Dumps, which gave it five stars for having everything a true derelict might want — dollar beers and two-dollar whiskeys, skanky urinals and wet bathroom floors breeding all kinds of molds and fungi, dim lights and dirty mirrors behind the bar so you didn’t notice how old or bald or fat or drunk you were getting. The jukebox featured George Jones drinking songs, Marvin Gaye, Al Green, Otis Redding, Miles Davis’s “All Blues,” Frank Sinatra’s Songs for Swingin’ Lovers. The walls were wood paneling, decorated with clown portraits and beer mirrors and Toby mugs on a plate rail just below the ceiling, and a couple of dozen ceramic busts of sailors and leprechauns realistically rendered in porcelain at about a third of actual scale. The dour bartender, Silent Neil, hadn’t spoken or even turned around to look at the television since Bill Buckner let the ball dribble through his legs in the sixth game of the 1986 World Series. Stella took her customary post just inside the Bay State’s front door. She was allowed inside but preferred the doorway, explaining, “I’ll roll on a dead carp, I’ll even eat cat turds, but that place grosses me out.”
During his separation and divorce from Karen, and in the détente that followed, the Bay State had become his sanctuary, literally, a place she’d promised not to frequent so that he could feel secure, knowing he wasn’t going to run into her there. He’d reciprocated by giving her the bar at the Hotel Northampton as a safe haven, though she didn’t seem nearly as bothered by the whole situation as he was. Of course, that meant if she went on a date, she’d go to the bar at the Hotel Northampton, which had floor-to-ceiling windows facing the street, not that Paul ever parked across the street and spied on her with his binoculars … or anything.
“The traveler returns,” Doyle called out as Paul walked in.
Paul regarded his friends. Doyle was a drummer in a blues band. Brickman was a sandy-haired, Kennedyesque stockbroker. Bender was a photographer. McCoy was a jazz piano player who got asked on a regular basis, “You’re really talented — why don’t you move to New York?” Yvonne ran the computer lab at UMass. D. J. and Mickey taught psychology, he at UMass, she at Amherst College. The code of conduct at the Bay State was that nobody judged anybody — live and let live, and accept people for who they are. Paul found it easy to live by such rules. It felt good to be home.
He raised his beer to O-Rings, who didn’t do anything for a living, as far as anybody knew. Nevertheless he somehow always had money for pinball and owned four of the machine’s top five all-time record scores. O-Rings lived with Marie, a sweet woman, and they’d just had a baby, but somehow it hadn’t cut into O-Rings’s pinball schedule or reduced the number of pints of Guinness he downed every night. He’d been called O-Rings ever since the space shuttle Challenger blew up, for reasons that were no longer clear.
“So how’s your dad?” Doyle said. “Do they know how bad a stroke it was?”
“He can’t walk and he can only move his right hand.”
“I get like that,” D. J. said.
“On a good day,” Mickey added.
“So what’s the prognosis?” McCoy asked. “Can he talk?”
“Nope,” Paul said. “I think I’ll be able to get online with him and he’ll be able to answer yes-or-no questions by clicki
ng the mouse, but that’s about it. We haven’t got it all set up yet.”
“Bummer,” Doyle said.
“How old is your dad?” McCoy asked.
“Seventy-two,” Paul said.
“When’s his birthday?” Yvonne asked.
“I don’t know. It’s in July.”
“You don’t know when your own father’s birthday is?” she chastised him. “What kind of shitty son doesn’t know when his own father’s birthday is? I’ll bet he knows when yours is.”
“Well, he was there when I was born,” Paul said. “If I was there when he was born, I’d probably remember too.”
“Let’s drink to Paul’s dad!” Doyle proposed. Everybody raised their glasses and said, “To Paul’s dad!” Paul joined them.
He found a stool open at the bar next to his friend Bender, the photographer, and asked him how he was.
“I suck,” Bender said. “I shot a wedding four years ago but I never got around to printing the pictures. Now I just heard they’re getting divorced, but I can’t find the negatives.”
“They still want the pictures?”
“Go figure,” Bender said. “I just want to get paid.”
“I have a question for you,” Paul said. “You’re a fitness guy — what’s better exercise, running or bicycling?”
“Better for what?”
“For getting in shape. Losing weight.”
“Well,” Bender said, “running burns more calories, but cycling is easier on your body. Especially your knees. Why?”
“I took a vow,” Paul said. “Seeing my dad inspired me. Maybe scared me is a better word.” He considered telling Bender about the fortune cookie and his fight with Carl but changed his mind.
“If you’re only going to do one, you should run,” Bender advised. “Running is a four-season sport. If you want to cycle, you probably have to join a gym in the winter. Or get a good stationary bike. I don’t have room for one in my apartment.”