“Hot chocolate, dear. Be careful not to burn yourself.” Elly picked it up with both hands and set it down between small gulps.
“The barista is so unfriendly. I wonder what's wrong with her,” she said, sitting down on the other side of me. “How have you been?” she asked.
“I'm fine.” James, Ruth, Mary—my life had seen more upheaval in the past month than in the past two years. This vacation was an opportunity to put some distance between myself and them, to allow me to reflect on the situation objectively. “How're you?”
“Oh my God, trying to get this new site off the ground is killing me. We're having a launch party on Friday. I can't remember the last time I was this stressed. And Elly's been a handful; she's been talking non-stop. She's so excited about the trip.”
“Yeah I can tell,” I said, turning to Elly and winking. “We'll have a good time, won't we?”
“Mhm.”
“I bet you can't wait to see Gramps and Grams.”
“I can barely stand it.”
Helen handed me a cloth bag with a drawstring containing allergy medicine, children's painkillers, antibiotic ointment, eye drops, and more, and reminded me that Elly was to be in bed by nine-o'-clock every night at the latest—no matter what her grandparents might think. Also, she could have sweets, but not too many, as Helen had read an article linking even minor sugar consumption in children to increased risk of heart failure later in life. I would have to sleep on the couch since her grandparents only had one spare bedroom, which I assured her was no problem at all. Except for the Fourth of July, which I had off, I was to be at Elly's side every moment (“No chasing Chicago girls.”). She gave me a disposable phone pre-programmed with a list of numbers I was to call if anything went wrong (“I also emailed the numbers to you, and texted them, in case you lose the phone.”). On top of her number, Mr. Felkin's, and their house phone, I had both her grandparents' numbers, their home phone, two friends of hers in Chicago (“Do not hesitate to call them”), her work phone, Mr. Felkin's work phone, and the number for the local branch of her bank in case of financial problems—or any problems with the authorities in general.
Her level of preparation astounded me; I'd packed my suitcase in about fifteen minutes and texted Edward that I was visiting him on the fourth. Her organizational skills must be the root cause of her success, and I ruefully realized I'd never be able to ascend the way she had given the same circumstances—or even with those more forgiving. And yet here she was, placing her trust in me to take care of her kid.
We left the coffee shop and pushed our way through the morning rush. The train was waiting on the platform and at the far end the conductor—a middle-aged black woman—directed passengers to their respective cars.
“Did you see that I mailed you the tickets,” she asked?
“Yes,” I lied.
“Bye honey,” she said, swooping down to squeeze Elly. “Behave yourself. And don't give Cliff any trouble.”
“I won't Mommy.”
“You be careful too,” she said to me.
“I will Helen. I'll take care of Elly. Try not to worry about us too much.”
“Be sure to call every day and check in.”
“Of course.”
Helen watched us board the train. I brought up Elly's ticket on my phone so she could present it to the conductor—it felt like a suitable lesson in responsibility.
“I'm visiting Gramps and Grams,” Elly said.
“Are you excited?” the conductor asked, smiling warmly.
“Yeah!”
“If you're gonna visit them, I need that ticket dear.” The conductor stooped down and Elly showed it to her, though with a flicker of trepidation. Was it because the woman was black? I felt guilty at the thought, and doubted Elly was old enough to see the world in that way. It was, of course, because this woman—a stranger, after all—had descended from the troposphere of the adult world. And my mind jumped immediately to race. I should've been nicer to Beverly. Maybe she thought I'd acted that way because I was racist, that my badly suppressed smirk was an outward expression of inward prejudice. But if I'd been nicer it would've been phony on account of her being black and me being a white person sensitive to accusations of bigotry. The ideal situation would be for me to treat everyone with kindness and respect, so no one would confuse me being an asshole with me being racist. However, if she had been white would I actually have treated her the same way? After all, I saw Elly's response to the conductor through my own racialized lens—so maybe I was unconsciously racist and had no recourse. And those teenagers at the Cock-a-Doodle Chicken, who'd ended their shifts late because of Ruth and I...
“Sir?”
“Huh?”
“Your ticket.”
“Oh right, sorry.” I flashed a smile that I hoped said I was apologetic and not a guilty white supremacist.
I brought it up on my phone and she scanned it. “Backmost car, all the way to the right.”
* * *
Six hours later Elly was slumped against my arm while I watched the countryside pass by. Helen had booked us a sleeping car with a bunkbed and a small, dingy couch. Elly's Zephyr lay at her feet, next to the empty wrapper of a cereal bar plucked from a hemp bag Helen had filled with goodies for us country crossing carpetbaggers.
The train slowed and came to a stop. My ubiquitous companion, the toneless, feminine voice, spoke from a speaker in the top corner of the room: “We're experiencing a slight delay. We thank you for your patience.”
Thirty minutes later we hadn't moved an inch. We were parked outside a Pennsylvania farm, next to a field of corn aligned in neat rows. Their stalks were monstrous—eight feet tall at the end of June—but pink and purple speckled fungi burst from over half the unshucked ears.
Workers in drab gray clothes shuffled in between the rows. They carried bulky black backpacks, attached to which were long metal tubes with showerheads affixed at the end.
They were beneficiaries of Valley Forge, the most ambitious anti-homelessness and anti-poverty program in living memory. After the Panic, the once merely impoverished had been forced from their homes in droves. They'd swarmed the cities and the suburbs to panhandle, pick through trash, and get by in other, less savory ways.
In response, the government outlawed vagrancy. It had been framed as an issue of morality, that for a nation to allow homelessness in the twenty-first century was like a nation allowing slavery in the twentieth. The right to employment and housing was as basic as the right to a free press, and the state would protect those rights if the free market couldn't. The modern day Hoovervilles springing up around the country were dismantled, their residents relocated to flyover country and provided with jobs in complexes run by a variety of private contractors who slowly coalesced under the umbrella of Liberty Bell.
The policy had been a resounding success and a public relations coup. The working poor still needed for menial labor stayed behind, but the bums were shipped off—presumably to a better life. I'd seen the award-winning Common Sense story about some poor, gay teenager, abused by his parents and thrown on the street who, with the help of Valley Forge, was able to rejoin society with a new sense of self-sufficiency and valuable job skills. Even Robespierre and the other Jacobins begrudgingly admitted the program's virtues. And those homeless who couldn't be rehabilitated: the handicapped, the mentally ill, and the hopeless junkies? Out of sight, out of mind, vague rumors of pharmaceutical and surgical behavior modification notwithstanding.
I watched a tall, white man with a shaved head plod along his row, raising the tube and blasting each infected ear of corn with a cloud of mist. After several moments he looked up and caught me staring. He dropped the sprayer and began shambling towards the train. It left a shallow furrow in the dirt as he dragged it along. As he edged closer my heart seized in fear, and I felt the instinctive panic of a cornered animal. I knew it was absurd—between us was a fence lined with razor wire, an irrigation ditch, and the train itself, but the mindless s
avagery raging in his eyes disregarded distance and had no concept of physical impossibility.
He stopped at the fence, his arms hanging limp at his sides and his head tilted up in a way that suggested it took great physical effort on his part to maintain the pose. My terror turned to curiosity, and I pushed my forehead against the glass. Had he been lobotomized? I thought I saw a small scar above his right eyebrow, but he was far away and my imagination was in hyperdrive. Besides, a lobotomy was supposed to render you docile, not rabid.
I never decided on a satisfactory explanation. The train lurched and groaned, and the zombie farmer swiveled his head to track my window as we rumbled away. Elly stirred and asked for another cereal bar. We each ate one, then watched Eponymals. The cornfield receded behind us.
* * *
We were scheduled to hit Chicago around midnight, but dawn found us stuck in a crumbling Indiana ghost town. When we finally arrived, a trip scheduled to take six hours had ballooned to twenty-four. The conductor wished us a pleasant stay in Chicago as we stepped off, and Elly showed her the picture she'd drawn on her tablet of a ruined factory. We'd stopped beside it for several hours.
Helen's mother was waiting for us on a bench near the tracks. Elly cried “Grams!” when she saw her, and dropped her backpack as she ran. Her grandmother stood up and waddled forward, and Elly wrapped her arms around her Grams's waste. I smiled at the cutesiness—an irrepressible, cheek to cheek grin—and picked up her discarded backpack.
“Hello Mrs. Berger. I'm Cliff,” I said, shaking a hand extended over Elly's buried head.
“Hello, Cliff.” She paused. “Have we met before?”
“Yeah, once briefly. I was a friend of Ryan's.”
“Right.” I stared at Elly, awkward and unsure how to continue.
“Where's Gramps? Why isn't he here?” Elly demanded, taking his absence as a personal slight.
“He's in the restroom, honey. He'll be so disappointed he missed your train.”
“He should be!”
“We can yell at him when he gets here.” She sat back down. Elly, who was too big for her grandmother's frail body, clambered into her lap, but if Mrs. Berger minded she hid it beneath a kind, stoic face, listening patiently as Elly told her about every detail of the train ride and the landscapes she'd seen and how they'd served her breakfast and how she had a new computer to watch TV shows on and about the bathroom and how nice the conductor was and on and on... Throughout it all her grandmother cradled her in her arms, laughing and gasping, her attention wholly on her granddaughter's inanities.
It had been five years since I'd last been to Chicago, when I'd attended my mother's funeral. I didn't bear the city any ill will, but I was over it forever. Like when you finish high school and can't imagine walking through those particular glass doors ever again. I'd spent my childhood in and around the city, and it had etched its influence on myself. Then I'd grown up and left, looking forward to a successful life out East. Although if success lay ahead for me, it was beyond the horizon or in possession of effective camouflage.
When her grandfather returned Elly hopped off her Gram's lap and hugged him. He was stocky and bald and leaned heavily on a wooden cane.
“Gramps!”
“Elly-baby!”
He threw his cane to the ground and scooped her in his arms more easily than I could have. It was evidence in favor of James's theory about old-man strength: as men aged they replaced their former flexibility with a rigidity that created the illusion of immense physical prowess. To use his analogy, which I thought was moronic, consider a table made of glass compared to one of rope: the glass table can bear a heavier load, even though it is more brittle and cannot bend. I told him his analogy was false—a rope table would hold more weight than one made of glass—and we never came to an agreement on the basic facts of the matter.
“Hello Mr. Berger. I'm Cliff.” He didn't offer his hand, but nodded his head.
“Pleased to meet you. My thanks for keeping our granddaughter safe.”
“It's my job, sir.”
He grunted. “All right Elly-Baby. You ready to go?”
We walked to the parking garage. The station had fallen on hard times; most of the storefronts were empty, and even those still in business had their share of broken windows. I could see straight through into an empty sandwich shop staffed by a lone, plucky black teenager and into a gift shop with bare shelves. New York looked utopian compared to the busiest train station in Chicago, and I wondered if Leopold Heights was the new urban norm rather than a neglected neighborhood on the outskirts of civilization.
The parking garage was better maintained—barely. The graffiti had been painted over half-way, as if whoever was in charge decided to move on from one tag to the next after rendering the message unreadable. All of the lights worked, however, and I suppose there was something to be said for that.
The Bergers had parked on the fourth level, and the elevator was broken. Mr. Berger told his wife and Elly to wait while he and I brought the car down. I said I could take care of it alone, but he waved away the idea with a shake of his hand.
“Come on... Cliff was it?”
He pulled himself up the stairs by the railing and a heavy thud accompanied every other step as he put the entire weight of his body on his good leg. He didn't say anything and I had no idea what I should talk about with him. I got on well with older women—mothers, grandmothers and such—because I could adopt a flirtatious attitude minus the sexual subtext. Being clever, friendly, and talkative worked well enough with them, but when it came to older men like Elly's grandfather—or Mr. Felkins—I was at a loss. They saw their world as a conquered space, a niche they'd carved out and could call their own, and had little interest in the lives and aspirations of those outside their bubble. Women enjoyed hearing my stories and were interested in me as a person. Or at least they were better able to pretend.
We took a break at the top of the first flight of stairs. I kept my eyes on the ground to avoid being pressured into conversation, and turned over my possible futures in my mind like a charred rotisserie chicken. I couldn't tutor Elly forever, and either my cousin would take his house back someday or Liberty Bell or the government would come and seize it. My best bet was to get hitched to someone successful enough to support me and become a stay-at-home dad. Maybe Ruth? Or—
“What are you looking at?” Mr. Berger asked.
“Eh?”
“You were gawking at my limp.”
“Um... No sir, I wasn't.”
“Yeah okay. Let's get going.”
His comment about my ableist gaze was no more than a pretext to bring up the subject. At the top of the third flight he said, “Do you know how I got it?”
“No, sir. Why would I?”
“I thought Helen might have told you. I was caught in the airborne toxic event.”
I hazarded a guess. “Partial paralysis?”
“No. When it got into our office building I jumped down an empty elevator shaft. Three stories. I was able to crawl to a utility closet and stuff the cracks with rags.”I was in there for five days. I was afraid to leave. I didn't want to come out and find the world had come to an end.”
“My mom was caught in rush hour traffic when it happened,” I said.
“A lot of people were. After the hazmat team found me they carried me through the building's lobby. The bodies hadn't been cleared yet.”
“That's awful.”
“Ryan was captured not long after that. He'd just gotten promoted, you know, and he was supposed to visit us for Christmas.” He stood at the top of the stairs, staring outside like he was looking at an alternate history, one where his grandson and two million faceless Chicagoans were still alive.
“They're probably waiting for us downstairs,” I said. I hadn't asked to be privy to this man's extinguished hopes for his dead grandchild. Why even offer that information to me in the first place? I could see the deaths he'd witnessed playing out in his head—experiences in
communicable to anyone who hadn't been there. Those and other half-remembered memories were best left boxed up to collect dust in a confused and aging mind.
My first summer after college I'd been digging through our attic for God-knows-what-reason and had stumbled upon a plastic bin full of old action figures. Each one had a missing limb, a ripped cape, a cracked torso, some evidence of decay, but as I sifted through them my mind drifted back to my childhood. The first thoughts had been happy, of weekends spent organizing battle lines on my bedroom carpet. Then I remembered how lonely I'd been as the dorky new kid at school. Having no friends, I created imaginary narratives where no one else was needed.
People are tough and most get through the worst times without damaging their psyche to the point of ruin. Pets die, grandparents die, parents die, children die, and people continue with their lives, harsh as that sounds. Life sucks, shit happens, get over it.
These memories, so-called nostalgia—far too innocent of a word for such an awful feeling—are self-inflicted wounds. No one forced me to root through the attic, just like no one forced Mr. Berger to tell me about his brush with death and his Christmas with Ryan that was never to be. We open these boxes, for whatever reason, and are trapped into confronting our own mortality and the immutability of the past, which is no more than a chain of experiences lost to us forever as we hurtle towards oblivion. The act of remembering is nothing but a reminder of all the loss and hardship we've accumulated before we collapse from a heart attack or die in a plane crash or are shot or bombed or beheaded by a member of our own species. And when we choose to travel down that road, hoping perhaps to find one solace in pleasant memories, we find old boogie-men instead.
James had a motto: “People are morons, and deserve the same respect you show a cow as you load it into your mouth.”
“You're right,” Mr. Berger said.
“Huh? About what?”
“Enough standing around. Let's get to that car.”
We found the Bergers' car, a luxury sedan. He drove us to the bottom of the garage and Elly and her grandmother piled in.
The Merchants of Zion Page 17