The Moment Before

by Jason Makansi

  She’d wanted to go through the rest of the museum, but figured some company would do her some good. “Is there a coffee shop close by?

  “There’s one toward the university.”

  “How far is that?”

  “Or … we could go to my place,” Penndel said. Holly grimaced, and he added, “It’s only a few blocks. I mean, obviously, I’m nonthreatening.”

  “Well, you could have a weapon.”

  “Funny you should mention that. I do carry a gun. I have it right here.” He pointed to a bag hooked to the side of his chair. “My neighborhood may have a fancy new museum, but that doesn’t mean it’s gentrified.”

  “We could have a duel, then, because I’ve got one, too.” Holly patted her enormous purse. She’d never told anyone that she carried a gun and was astonished at how easy it was to tell this total stranger. “I own—or rather owned—a club down in Cairo, Illinois. Anyone who deals in the drinking and dancing trades should carry a gun.”

  “Anyone living in Cairo should own an arsenal!”

  “I’m not sure about that,” Holly said with a laugh. “But, I’m up for a cup of Joe.”

  “Ha!” Penndel started toward the door. “Follow me for the best coffee served in this neighborhood.”

  Penndel’s place, a converted warehouse, was about half a mile away, actually further than the coffee shop. What struck her about it, besides the fact that it took up half a city block, were the thick glass block windows and the fact that the first floor was littered with various pieces of what looked like mangled objects of twisted metal and warped plastic rescued from a junkyard, except they were mounted on display pedestals.

  Holly followed Penndel’s wheelchair across the cement floor to an old service elevator, donned with an accordion gate for the door and a splintered wooden plank floor.

  “Good thing I’m not barefoot,” she said as she closed the accordion gate.

  “Good thing I don’t have to worry about that.”

  On the second floor, Holly noted a bed in one corner of the wide-open room and a kitchen along the interior wall. She was impressed that there were expansive windows along the south and west sides of the building. She walked over to the south wall where she could see a large arena under construction a few blocks away. To the west, she could see vacant lots and more warehouses.

  “Now that we’re here, would you like coffee or I’ve got tea?” Penndel wheeled himself toward the the kitchen, a wide area equipped with wheelchair accessible counters and a comfortable table.

  “Coffee would be great.”

  After a few moments, he called out, “You want a shot of bourbon in yours?”

  “Too early,” she said with a laugh. “Besides, I’ve got to get back on the road soon.”

  He set two mugs on the table and looked at her. “Just so you don’t have to wonder, I’m no war hero.”

  Holly sputtered and looked everywhere but at his legs.

  “Just wanted to clear that up in case you were embellishing what you see. My condition resulted from an abrupt meeting between me and the pavement. I thought I was leaping into a perimeter ditch to avoid enemy fire and protect my buddy, but after my pharmaceutical cocktail cleared, it turned out it was a third story window. They don’t give you a medal for that.”

  “Did it happen here in St. Louis?”

  “Yeah. The VA hospital.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “Yeah, well … At least my brain is thankful that it only has half a body to fuck with now. The bottom half no longer listens.”

  Holly blew on her coffee and took a sip. “So, what do you think about Joe?”

  “It’s a huge mass of steel. Sure, you can see the sky, but can’t you see the sky from anywhere? It’s just a larger version of the stuff I have downstairs. Junk turned into art.”

  “At first, I thought the same thing, but then, after I looked skyward, I realized it made the sky finite, comprehensible, approachable. Your field of vision is so limited in there.”

  “Pardon? My field of vision is limited?”

  “No, not you. That’s not what I meant. When I looked up, I felt like I was looking at my own piece of the infinite sky.”

  “That’s an interesting take. Maybe I didn’t give Joe a chance.”

  “Well, you didn’t get off to a great start. I can’t believe they don’t have a ramp there for—”

  “For people like me. It’s okay to say it.”

  “Yeah, for people like you. Art, of all things, should be accessible to everyone.” She paused and took another sip.

  “By the way, thank you for helping me at the museum. I know I was an asshole, but when you exist below the plane of talking heads, it takes some screaming and yelling to be noticed up there. Sometimes, people treat you like a child when you’re in a chair. Maybe you know what I mean. You’re short, near my plane of existence.”

  Holly ignored the quip about her height. It was old and tired. Blonde jokes. Short jokes. Barbie jokes. She’d heard them all. “So, what about all those pieces displayed downstairs?”

  “I thought I’d created a new art form, but turns out there’s nothing new under the sun. I use old computers, usually available for free or nearly free around the university. It’s actually mystical in some ways. I think about all the data on those hard drives, all the information being fused together into a big blob. It’s funny because information is so ethereal, always moving and changing, then you see it reduced to this permanent, static state.”

  “Wow. That’s pretty deep.” Holly had barely ever used a computer, but the idea of destroying one now intrigued her. “What’s your process?”

  “I built a home smelter. Well, I call it that, but it’s actually an industrial-strength fire pit for my industrial-strength building.” He laughed. “And I call what I do ‘art’ because it sounds better than saying I’m a pyromaniac. Anyway, I get a fire going, throw in the discarded equipment, watch the plastic melt off and the metal parts fuse together. There’s probably a law against it. Burning plastic and electronics. Who knows what sort of VOCs—volatile organic compounds—I’m putting in the air. But no one’s paid any attention so far, and it hasn’t killed me yet. Anyway, just watching the stuff melt got boring, so I bought an acetylene torch, and now I take a more active role in directing the melting and fusing. Sometimes I’ll torch something, pour ice water over it, and see what happens. Sometimes I’ll only disfigure the machine, and sometimes, I’ll reduce it down to its bare bones. You can watch sometime, if you want. It’s quite a sight to witness one of these digital brains go up in flames.”

  “I’d like to, someday,” Holly said. “Do you sell your work? Is that how you made the money to buy this building?”

  “No, I have a small inheritance. And I get a pension from Uncle Pentagon, and a structured settlement from a class-action suit for being a guinea pig in some whacko experiments the Army was doing way back when.”

  “No kidding. I had a small inheritance, too. I invested mine in the dance club in Cairo.”

  Well, we have more in common than a coincidental rendezvous in some heavy metal museum.”

  “And our weapons,” Holly chided, then laughed. “Do you want to sell your work?” Holly asked again after a pause.

  “I have no patience for selling. Just trying to keep myself occupied is work enough. Let’s face it, I’m am a pyromaniac, unequivocally, not an artist. I ended up in the army because I got a thrill burning and blowing shit up when I was a kid. Figured I could do it for Uncle Sam and get paid.”

  “Well, do you ever display your work?

  “I’ve had some people over from time to time. They want me to display it. Frankly, I could give a shit.”

  “Well, if you don’t give a shit, why don’t you throw them in the garbage after you are done?”

  He looked at her, at first, like he was offended, like what right did she have asking him that question? Then, with half a smile, he asked, “Do I know you well enough to answer that?”r />
  “Do you know anyone well enough to answer that?”

  Holly realized how disingenuous she was being. She never let anyone read what she wrote. No one had ever heard her compositions for piano.

  Penndel launched into a monologue about what computers represented: knowledge, retrieving it, collecting it, organizing it, creating it, propagating it, falsifying it, privatizing it, socializing it, and how inside each computer resides the ghosts of the human and digital networks sustained and destroyed by that knowledge. As his spiel went on, Holly suspected his coffee had been laced with a double shot of bourbon and a pinch of Valium.

  “Think about it,” he said. “We call this the information age. What age hasn’t been about information? The talking heads, they make up shit like ‘the knowledge worker’. Have you ever heard anything so imbecilic?”

  Watching Penndel get so worked up, flailing his arms, and fidgeting in his chair was entertaining in itself. She listened to him go on and on, mesmerized by his passion.

  “Behold, a newspaper, ‘All the News That’s Fit to Print.’ What is that flimsy set of pages you hold in your hands every morning? It’s the sum total of knowledge collected in a twenty-four hour period by a human network, analyzed, organized, filtered, and sanitized for public consumption. Knowledge ingested and regurgitated through other networks. Not only that, but people throw newspapers into their fireplaces, or use them to start up a pile of charcoal for their outdoor grill. Me, I torch computers.”

  Holly looked deep into her cup, then back at Penndel. “So, are you liberating these ghosts or silencing them?”

  “Cremating them. Plain and simple. Maybe information is like energy and can’t be destroyed.”

  “You say you cremate the computers, but why do you save the pieces? Why don’t you bury them or scatter the remains over water or something?”

  “Why do cemeteries exist? Why encase the dead in wood and steel and bury them six feet deep? Why erect gravestones? Why burn the flesh off bones? Why do urns filled with ashes sit on mantles?”

  She didn’t know how to answer that. With her estranged mother dead and her beloved father disappeared, she’d thought about societal expectations for memorializing the dead and gone. She was still thinking about it. She just hadn’t come to any conclusions.

  “Because the bits of data and the strands of information sitting in those hard drives are also pieces of incrimination. The ‘e’ in electronic communication today stands for evidence,” Penndel continued. “Now, it’s all going up into the clouds as if it’s nothing more than dissipating vapor, instead of a permanent record. Taken out of context, information can destroy a life. By fusing all of it—hardware, software, bits and bytes—into one mass, the life intended, even if not the life lived, is preserved even if it is not accessible.”

  Holly was at a loss. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had such an esoteric conversation. Maybe she’d never had one.

  “So, enough about me, blondie, what’s your story? How’d you end up here today?

  “First of all, don’t call me blondie.”

  He looked up at her, studying her face. “Point taken. Go on.”

  “I left Cairo this morning headed to Joliet, and happened to take an impromptu detour into St. Louis. I heard an ad on the radio about the new museum and needed a break from the road.”

  Pendell nodded, and then said, “It’s a bit out of the way, isn’t it?”

  “I’m in no hurry.”

  “So why Cairo and why Joliet?”

  “I grew up in Joliet and took refuge in Cairo. Father disappeared when I was ten, mother drove me crazy by the time I was eighteen. My life so far has been a roadmap of bad relationships, bad decisions, wrong choices that have taken me from one useless Illinois town to another. Maybe I should try another state for awhile.” She searched Penndel for reaction. Found little. “My life’s a pulp fiction novel, or a bad country song. Take your pick.”

  “We’d make a good pair.”

  “You can fuse my life together from B-movie celluloid.”

  “You’re still not telling me anything relevant. What was the deal with your father?”

  “Do I know you well enough to answer that?” she said with a smile.

  “Do you know anyone well enough to answer that?” he threw back.

  “Another time, perhaps.”

  “So, you say you left Cairo? Is that as in leaving for a vacation or leaving for good?”

  “For good. I would have left earlier except this government guy showed up one night, talking like there might be a major federal investment in the area. It’s a long story. Or, rather a short one that ended in no federal investment.”

  “I’ve got all the time in the world. Since you dropped the story about your dad, tell me your Cairo story. Long or short, either version will do.”

  “I’ll tell you in exchange for another cup of coffee.”

  “Deal.” Penndel took her cup and rolled over to the counter, poured, picked up and waved the cream at her.

  “Just a tad,” Holly said.

  Penndel poured the cream and returned to the table. “My part of the deal is complete,” he said. “Now, tell me your tale of woe.”

  “It was August last year. Miserably hot. The air conditioning was barely working in my club. This guy wanders in, clearly out of place, not only because he was white and clean cut, but he was wearing a starched white shirt and power tie. His hair reminded me of a manicured green on a golf course. And his hands were definitely manicured. Nicer nails than mine. Anyway, he said he was scoping out sites for federal facilities. Something his department did routinely. I gave him the five-star treatment, got him drunk, hoping I could pry some information out of him.”

  “Did you sleep with him?” Holly’s mouth dropped open and Penndel threw his hands up. “Sorry. Don’t answer that.”

  “Yeah, I definitely don’t know you well enough to go there.”

  “Okay, go on, please.”

  “Anyway, nothing good had happened in Cairo in decades, but if the government planned to build something big, the value of my building would go up, you know? Well, up for Cairo. At that point, I was already planning my exit and my next best option was what everyone else had done—torch the place for the insurance. So, after I lathered him up, he said something about the facility being an internment camp for terrorists rounded up in the War on Terror. It was kind of ironic. He said he was Jewish, my father is from Syria, and we were in a town known as a main stop on the Underground Railroad, and he was talking about internment camps as if it was no big deal. Just another tool for keeping Americans safe. Anyway, nothing happened. He never came back.”

  “I remember the talk about internment camps shortly after the planes went into the towers,” Penndel said. “Never realized it got serious, though.”

  “Another close encounter of the absurd kind. Wasted another half a year hoping I’d get an insider tip, just not the tip of some government guy’s dick trying to get in my pants.”

  Holly immediately felt guilty for embellishing the story. The guy, she couldn’t remember his name, had been completely honorable. She’d been the one pushing the envelope. She’d been the one leading him on.

  “Well, you needn’t worry about that with me. Mine doesn’t even work anymore.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. And she really was. Too bad she hadn’t met him before, she thought. “And, no. I didn’t sleep with him.”

  Less than a month later, a moving truck arrived from Cairo and delivered Holly’s belongings to Penndel’s building—including her piano and the neon sign she’d designed and hung outside her bar. Before she decided to take him up on his offer to move in, she’d driven down from Joliet to spend a few days with him, a roommate test run, Penndel called it. They sat up late telling stories they’d both bottled up so long that they poured forth like the bottle had been unstoppered and turned upside down. He told her about who he’d been before Vietnam and his subsequent escape into the fog of
drugs, and she told him about her childhood, about growing up with a cop for a mom and an immigrant taxi driver for a father, about all the time she spent riding with her dad and the music they’d listened to, about the books she read out loud to help him with his English and the visceral fear she felt the evening rioters started rocking her father’s taxi after Martin Luther King’s assassination. And she told him how her father had gone home to Syria to visit his dying father and was never heard from again.

  And then, as soon as she’d settled in, they went back to visit Joe and while she looked up at her infinite piece of the sky, she told Penndel how her mother had thrown her out of the house when she’d gone with a high school teacher—yes, it was a man—all the way to DC to try to find out something about her father’s disappearance.

  “There was a congressional staffer there,” she said, “who tried to help. He was the only person we talked to who seemed to care. But even with the resources of being a senator’s aide, he couldn’t find anything out about my father. It was like my dad was sucked into a black hole.”

  “You’ve never heard anything since then? Nothing from his family?”

  “Nothing. I regret that my mother and I never reconciled, but I can’t understand and probably won’t ever forgive her indifference to finding out what happened.” Holly knew she was a fool for getting so emotional after all these years, but she her eyes stung with tears she hadn’t cried in forever. “He was her husband, after all. He left and never came back. How could she not want to know?”

  Penndel was silent.

  “But here,” Holly waved her arm to encompass Joe’s inner sanctum, “I feel his presence.” She looked up and peered into the blue again. “That first time I came and looked up, it was so disorienting. The puffs of white and the infinite blue just hanging above the opening of the enclosure of the rusted steel plates, I don’t know …” She took a long breath and let it out slowly. “It’s like a portal or a window into what he sees when he looks up. Wherever he is.”