The Price of the Ticket

by Jim Nisbet

  Not that he ever for a moment ceased to cherish the event, to the horror of any number of prison psychiatrists.

  But it took Pauley a long time to come to terms with the idea that he had been, for lack of a better term, lucky, merely, in his formative years, to have witnessed this single example out of the innumerate, unrealized reversals fate fanned in front of him–or anyone else–like a poker hand with too many wild cards in it. To have been present when a single possibility evolved in an agreeable direction, unpredicted and unremembered by history, he had come to recognize as indisputably extraordinary. That Pauley’s father died in apposition to his ritual act of cruelty; that he died grisly; that the victim of his cruelty happened to witness his death; that the circumstances might be construed as just and meet, as a more perfect revenge; or that the circumstances might be just so–circumstantial, accidental, spontaneously mutable; that tragedy and fortune are indistinguishable from fate; that Pauley happened to be in the right place at the right time, and his father didn’t: these are the antithetical tenets of occasionalism: that events of reality are somehow acted upon by events of the mind. They apply to the man who canceled three airline reservations on three crashed flights; to ­rock-climbing and roulette; to Napoleon and Ney and Alexander and Miloradovich as well as to the dimly remembered scores of thousands who died in their company; to the beaten dog who watches the tree fall on the man who beat him. Why, it’s the very etymology of the word occasion: to fall. First causes aren’t mentioned. Things fall, and that’s all.

  Or is it?

  The occasionalism of his father’s death aside, Pauley would be the first to assert that force of personality can make a difference in the course of history: Tolstoy, Marx, and the host of armchair flow-of-history theorists in the circulation library of the California penal system notwithstanding. He wouldn’t be the first to have been wrong about it.

  In just a little while Pauley will pay a call on Martin Seam to push this idea again, one way or the other. Can an individual make a difference to his own fate?

  Tolstoy drove a $52,000 car, metaphorically speaking, and Engels, who also drove one, gave another one to Marx. In all cases, resources were inherited from progenitors too busy amassing them to waste time theorizing over the business of history flowing along whether an individual cuts about himself with his sword–or his pen–handily or not. Though they perhaps yearn for a coherent mathematics of their own children’s behavior, progenitors who do the amassing generally scoff at inheritors who do the theorizing. Pauley’s progenitor not withstanding, Pauley could afford himself the observation that the state of California had once spent approximately $52,000 to keep him in jail for two years. Does that debit qualify as a car with bars on its windows? Does the State inherit its resources, or does it take them by force? Do Tolstoy, Marx and the State all find something in common, in the likes of Pauley? What distinguishes the fates of men, between the ordinary and the extraordinary?

  Astrology inverted Occasionalism. But a man who believes that stars augur his endeavor gives a great deal more credit, as well as blame, to cosmic concern than Pauley, for one, was willing to share out. Despite formidable experience to the contrary, his father’s death for example, such beliefs smacked to Pauley not only of anthropocentrism but also of the loss of hope, and were therefore untenable. He was well aware that slaves, prisoners and Occasionalists perished every day of hope, and himself had cursed the least detectable flame of it in his own breast. Hope smolders, however, in the very roots of life. Often, Pauley thought, and he believed he knew, fate needs no more than a little nudge, a hint or a touch; no more than a length of wire and a joint of copper pipe, in order to fully realize itself.

  A hundred swallows circle a house. In its single-minded swoop for the nourishing insect a bird flies through an open window and within, momentarily, startles the inhabitants with its abrupt beauty. In its desperation to sustain itself this beauty might dash its motor against a wall; it might also find the open window a second time–a randomization gone backwards, a miraculous redundancy, a statistical double zero–and escape to freedom.

  All fate wants is for some person to leave the window open. Chance and the bird look after the rest.

  Perhaps “luck” would look after Seam’s business as well.

  The kid wore black pajamas to work. His hair looked like the fruitless crown of a decorative date palm. He wore two-hundred-dollar sneakers because an advertisement had suggested to him that to be shod in shoes that made his feet look like a pair of magnesium golf clubs would facilitate his sojourn along the heights of Mount Onan. According to the address on the truck’s title, Seam lived in a part of town that a retail sales clerk could ill afford. No doubt he indulged his credit cards likewise, and Pauley’s six hundred would be so much chaff in the little wind-devil of Seam’s consumerism. The trifling bundle had probably been spent long before Seam ever heard of Pauley. But Seam had been in possession of it for only five days. If Pauley could get to him soon, most of the cash might be recoverable. If he could get to Seam soon, Pauley might make the rent with Seam’s six hundred.

  That Seam might not have known about the fatal flaw in the Toyota engine never entered Pauley’s mind. That Seam had patched it up just enough to sell, Pauley never doubted. On the day of purchase, the oil was clean. A test-drive down Divisadero hadn’t exerted the motor enough to overheat it. The trip from the point of purchase to Pauley’s basement shop hadn’t worried it either. But a mile of freeway with a load of torture racks had brought the little gremlin out of its closet. The kid had changed the oil so as not to show any sign of water leakage, then waited for a buyer.

  While certainly appearing capable of little scams involving perhaps the cutting of his own hair, Seam hadn’t appeared remotely knowledgeable enough for the details of internal combustion. He probably thought it beneath him. Programming a VCR, sewing designer labels into second-hand clothes, stealing pain-killers from his dying grandmother–these would be more in his line. But to substitute new for contaminated oil, to fool someone who might know the difference appeared considerably beyond his technical scope, if not his deviousness.

  So someone had changed the oil for him: Premeditated fraud and, Mother of Christ, a conspiracy to get six hundred dollars.

  Pauley paused in front of his building to fish out his keys. Someone had gotten his goat today but good. Someone had gotten it earlier in the week, too, almost as good. If only he had known then what he knew now; that now, unlike then, there would be little or no goat left to get. Might he then have put that lawyer’s gun where the sun don’t shine, or died in the attempt?

  The thing to do was to not take it personally. History sweeps along, history gets its six hundred. The six hundred always exists, it just changes hands. One does what one can, one doesn’t take the results to heart–unless one wins, of course, or unless one looses very badly. Impersonal violence is terrible, but one wishes to observe one’s dismemberment with a greater equanimity.

  Fog had settled over the city. Its wind blew cold and dark. As Pauley keyed the lock to his street door an old black woman asked him for change. The woman wore a rag on her head and two overcoats, but her hands, tucked into her sleeves, appeared to be shaking. The filthy bath slippers on her otherwise bare feet wouldn’t be warming much. Pauley knew her and she knew Pauley, but they didn’t know each other’s names. They were neighbors, regulars on the block, who passed each other often on their disparate rounds. Pauley would have been surprised to discover that, outside of the fact that he often had change for her, she knew a great deal about him. She associated Celeste with him. She knew he made torture racks for rich sadomasochists, that he’d just bought a truck. In her opinion, Pauley was a man who did passing well for himself and his lady, came by it honestly, and could well afford to lay a dollar on her. All Pauley knew about her was that her assistance check arrived in the middle of the month, and she usually spent it on heroin. What the hell, her kids were already grown. For three or four days afterward sh
e ventured only infrequently into the street, and if she did it was with half-lidded, pinpoint eyes. At such times she might not recognize Pauley. One rainy night, back when it used to rain, he’d found her curled up in a doorway. She was dressed as usual. Her arms clutched about her shoulders she slouched peacefully against the doorjamb, half in and half out of the rain, unconscious. Her cigarette had burned all the way down and gone out, its ash forked between two knuckles in a little girl’s knitted glove.

  Other times, as tonight, she was exceedingly polite, whether Pauley gave her any change or not.

  Two cars were loudly contending for the right of way in the intersection just behind her as she asked, so he didn’t hear the question. But he understood it. He pulled a bill out of his pocket and glanced at it. Five dollars. A bella figura he could ill afford. He gave it to her. What difference did five dollars make to him? It made a big difference to her. Her eyes lit up almost reluctantly, as if they couldn’t believe that out of the hundreds of refusals and perhaps dozens of ten-cent acquiescences the action of her mind giving impetus to her voice to form the question on her lips had elicited a five dollar bill. Tears filled her eyes as she touched the money. She held it momentarily up to the streetlight to certify the bill’s authenticity. She unfolded and smoothed it in the air, saw the denomination at not one but two of its corners, and snapped it with a quick tug.

  “Oh,” she said. “Thank you, sir.…”

  “You’re welcome,” Pauley assured her. And, really, she was. What difference could a fiver make to him, who needed six or seven hundred of them by the end of the week which was–tonight? Tomorrow?

  “You have a real nice night, sir,” she said, enthusiastic on his behalf. “A real nice night. Thank you so much.”

  Pauley nodded. The smiling woman stepped into the street and raised her hand, as if hailing a cab. Pauley followed her gaze. In the bus zone across the intersection a pair of headlights dimmed and rebrightened congruent with a tremendous racket. The headlights levered through the changing traffic signal, propelled down the hill at a velocity inversely proportional to an audible decrepitude. The car was a very old Toyota sedan and Pauley thought, you see? Take care of your Toyota and it will last you forever, that son of a bitch. The Toyota banged and clattered in the middle of the street adjacent the woman, and did not stop entirely as she opened the door and got into the passenger seat with surprising dexterity, to be locomoted thence as if born along by a fulminating clangor of backfires, bent pushrods, holed pistons, broken springs, loose belts, grinding gears, and a convolving nimbus of acrid smoke that drifted through the throw of its headlamps, in advance of its source. The passenger door slammed and slammed again as the car crossed the next intersection down the hill, leaving Pauley a mere ghost of his own catalysis in some kind of romantic interlude involving food, heroin, and internal combustion.

  Some domestic scenes were that simple.

  He counted the steps with his sacrum. Two flights up, he opened the apartment door and Celeste greeted him with a curse.

  “It’s seven-thirty, already. Where you been, sailor-boy?”

  She’d hennaed her hair.

  Pauley sighed. “Don’t fuck with me, I’m tired, and I might ask you the same question.”

  She embraced him.

  “I been out,” she purred, “bringing home the prosciutto.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Bacon.”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  She fanned a deck of ironed twenties against his chest. They were of the crisper sort, spawned by automatic teller machines.

  Pauley stood woodenly, Celeste’s arm tugging at his neck. She was shorter than he. To her advantage, her lips and eyes glistened as she looked up at him.

  She was loaded, too. Strands of damp hair hung in her face, and her kohled eyes blazed above her stimulated blood like lights in the haze above a stock car race. There was even the dewy hint of perspiration above her upper lip, something Pauley always liked to see, because it meant she wouldn’t take no for an answer to anything for the rest of the evening. This friction passed for passion in a tiny household barely big enough to contain her animals and her personality. All a man had to do to capitalize was rise above his fatigue, and deal with her.

  He eyed the twenties. For a fact they represented quite a larger sum than she’d left home with a mere six or eight hours earlier.

  “You take that job?” he idly asked.

  “No!” she shouted joyously, and threw the money into the air.

  He’d known the answer to his question, but hearing it aloud was an annoyance. His mouth became very small.

  “You pulled a job.”

  “Yes! I mean–no big deal.” She snatched at a falling twenty and missed. “Dammit!” Turning, she missed another. “Shit!” She grabbed at a third and caught it. “Perfectly safe.” She studiously began to roll the twenty into a tiny, tight tube, adding, “The guy was holding too much blow to go to the cops over a little thing like money.”

  “Blow?” he repeated stupidly.

  She nodded.

  “Maybe he’d come directly here?” He turned her chin between his thumb and forefinger. “Where the pigeons roost?”

  She shook her head out of his gasp. “No way. A stone dweeb, all the way down the line.”

  Like Seam, thought Pauley sourly. A real mark.

  “He doesn’t know anybody?”

  “Will you relax?” she snapped.

  Pauley scowled. From the prim standpoint of an ex-convict, he was ill-advised to be associating with criminals, let alone sleeping with one. Also from the standpoint of an ex-convict, less prim, he found it very difficult to believe it was possible to associate with anything else. He looked at the money on the floor. Quite a few twenties. He regarded Celeste. She looked mighty cute with her tongue caught between her lips at one corner of her mouth, as it always was when she concentrated on rolling something. She had nice hands, too. And arms. That sleeveless thing. And legs. That skirt. And toenails, even when she painted them black.

  “Celeste.…”

  “Shut up and have a line, Pauley,” Celeste said, a coaxing retort. She had a little trick of folding the last corner of a twenty–or any other paper denomination–so that it wouldn’t come unrolled, a trick he’d never taken the trouble to master. He’d never taken much trouble over cocaine either. A little blast now and again. Illegal, too, another tiresome felony. Celeste looked up and winked. Even with clenched teeth she was cute. The rolled bill snapped like a locust departing a stalk of alfalfa and sailed right at him. He caught it reflexively. Pastoral foreplay.

  Beside the tarantula’s terrarium lay a vanity mirror. Pauley’s father’s straight razor lay upon its surface. Alongside the razor a pair of white lines led to a mound of white powder on a square of paper, not unlike the twin berms of a highroad leading to a necropolis. Taking up the razor Celeste adroitly scattered the lines with a sequence of taps from its sharper edge. Moments later, perhaps having improved upon its granulation, she again drew the cocaine into a long pair of parallel rows.

  Pauley watched the blade click against the mirror. When Celeste folded the razor and set it down, he blinked. A small patch of translucent crimson danced in a corner of his peripheral vision. A little twitch had developed in his cheek.

  Will physical time-travel be so instantaneous, when perfected?

  Directly behind the glass box of the tarantula’s terrarium, framed by it, a television flickered. A Mexican orange-kneed variety, the tarantula seemed animated tonight. Pauley had no idea how Celeste knew, but she claimed the spider was female, and called it Lieutenant Uhura. Lieutenant Uhura was tapping one forefoot against the pane of glass separating her from the soundless television, tapping slowly as if to some inaudible, extremely tentative tango. Lowering his face toward the cocaine Pauley caught the image of his own eye, hovering in the glass between himself and the spider, and experienced the familiar sensations he always had when passing too close to a reflection, of falling int
o it, of playing catch-up with something he didn’t understand, of needing time to think about something, of sticking his head into the whirling blades of a ceiling fan, of watching a flash like the bright tail of a fish in a deep glacial pool. It beat the rat race. Always.

  The mirror was trimmed in black and surmounted by an open-mouthed bat with little predatory teeth, faceted blue glass eyes, and wide-spread wings. The paper for the handmade envelope had been torn from a magazine, the parenthetic words (in thousands) printed on it parallel to numeric columns running at various angles to its flattened creases. The paper square contained at least two grams of finely granulated cocaine. By its look someone had already taken the trouble to run the entire amount through a mill, rendering Celeste’s ministrations with the razor superfluous and fetishistic, as usual. He shouldn’t be so hard on her. She had after all done him the courtesy of not replacing the razor on the mirror so he wouldn’t have to get his face too close to it. She was sensitive like that. The moment Pauley felt the cocaine against his mucous membranes he knew the quality to be extraordinary: the nasal pain was minimal, no tears came to his eyes, he didn’t sneeze. The absence of these symptoms indicated the drug hadn’t been cut with methedrine or baby laxative. After some kind of metabolic pause his face began to go numb; and he began to experience a general sense of well-being, as the textbooks don’t explain but lead one to expect from numb sinuses, as the rest of life teaches one not to hold one’s breath for.

  Celeste stood over him, passing a hand solicitously down his spine. “How’s your back?” she asked, palming his sacrum. He grunted. “Do the other line,” she commanded. Pauley filled his other nostril. “Now, here.” She handed him a jelly jar one-quarter full of Sangre di San Sebastiani, the red brandy only he liked. “Drink.” He smiled and hesitated. “Drink!” He took a sip. “Finish it!” He finished it. She took the empty jar and set it aside. “Now,” she said, reaching for the zipper on her skirt. “Let’s do it, baby.”