It was the vestiges of obsolete grandeur that had attracted him to the neighborhood, really—the few old, incongruously swanky brownstones, for instance, like the one whose fence he had just been propping himself up on, that remained standing among all the dilapidated remains of the last building boom. If he had to sacrifice his father’s apartment, he might as well retrench to someplace where at least it looked like a person could lead a reasonable life.
It was a beautiful day, he remembers, unseasonably warm—not that there actually were seasons any longer, as the girl observed rather ritually—so they’d lingered outside the Realtor’s for a bit, basking in the worry-evaporating sunshine while the dog appraised the ankles of passersby.
“Listen, thanks for your help. I really appreciate it,” he said.
Actually, he did appreciate it. Everything had been sliding around, roughing him up since he’d left his father’s apartment so precipitately, and her air of certainty was bracing—she just seemed to have been put together more on purpose than other people. Anyhow, more on purpose than he’d been.
She turned away—exercising no wiles, and yet he felt a slight tearing sensation. “Can I at least get you a coffee?” he’d said to his own surprise, indicating an attractive café across the street. He glanced around—not that some guy from school would just happen to be walking by and observe this!
“No thanks,” she said. “Moppet? Come on, Moppet.” But the dog was stubbornly inspecting Keith’s boot. “Moppet? Oh, well, coffee, why not.”
“I guess I don’t seem charming enough to be a psychopath, huh,” he said.
“Cheer up,” she said. “Sure you do. It’s just I could really use some caffeine, so I’ll take my chances.”
Her name was Celeste, he learned; she was four or five years older than he was, though she sort of looked like an eight-year-old, brooding about what flavor of ice cream cone to get. She worked at something she called a humanitarian crisis management center, it seemed that she lived alone, she referred to no boyfriend or girlfriend, and she was walking the dog, now curled up in her lap, for someone who lived down the hall.
Her office would be sending her to Europe soon, she told him. The project would take about a month, and then she’d be given some time off. “During which I’ll probably just sleep for a few weeks. It’s pretty tiring work.”
“Wow, a job in Europe,” he said. “That sounds great. I don’t suppose they need someone else?”
“I’m kind of trained? But they always need volunteers. You could definitely be plugged in someplace if you want to be a volunteer.”
A volunteer! The exact opposite of what he meant.
But still, a volunteer job in Europe would address both his lodging and his father issues. And how long could it take to rise up in the ranks? “So where’s this gig taking you, exactly?”
“Slovakia,” she said.
Slovakia? That was what she meant by Europe? “Guess I’d just get in the way,” he said.
“Could be,” she agreed.
“Well, listen,” he said. “If you hear of any jobs or any apartments here in the city, would you let me know? I’m pretty desperate.”
She looked at him intently, as if she were adding up columns of figures. “Well, okay,” she said after a moment, “I’ll ask around. Give me your number in case I do hear of something. Oh, right—no phone. So, how do I get in touch with you?”
“What about—well, could you meet me here on, say, Thursday?”
Again she considered him.
What was going on with her, he’d wondered—girls generally jumped at the chance to see him!
She shrugged. “Okay, why not. I’ll be walking the dog, anyhow.”
3
His father had decreed: yes, Keith could take a year off before law school or business school. But only on condition that he move out. He was to get his own apartment and a job. You’re twenty-two years old. By the—
Yes, yes, by the time his father was twenty-two, et cetera, et cetera . . . Had his father memorized some script? Had he studied his lines at schools for rich thugs? Well, come to think of it, sure—at the same schools he’d gotten Keith into . . .
But this same man—the CEO of SynthAquat Solutions, the lord of irrigation and crops, who could divert rivers and move lakes, who could flood fields for thousands of acres or leave them to be scorched, who could squeeze a stone and make coins come clattering out of it—this very same man was unable to grasp certain elementary facts: these days positions were not just sitting there the way they used to be, waiting to be filled by personable young men like Keith; these days apartments were not just sitting there, waiting to welcome personable young men like Keith.
With the best will in the world but without a phone call from his father whose name was the key to all locks, how was Keith supposed to manage? And his capricious father was suddenly not about to pick up the phone.
“I’m sick of doing every single fucking thing for you.” His father had looked at him as if he had only just noticed his presence. “Get you into this school, get you into that school, send you skiing here, send you sailing there. Just like that hopeless fucking train wreck from whose dainty loins you sprang. What are you going to do if some girl gets me to leave everything to her, huh? Happens, you know—it happens. When you’re old and gaga. That’s what they do, unsheathe their little talons, tie you up, drug you, sweet-talk your crooked lawyers into changing the will—how are you going to survive then, kiddo? Are you a pancake? Could I have produced a pancake? Now, take some initiative for once, just go on out there, do what you have to do, and don’t clutter up my life with your, ‘Gee, Dad’”—and his father had produced a cruel, treble whine—“‘how do I do this, Dad, how do I do that?’”
* * *
But to rent even the filthiest burrow it turned out that it was necessary to show one’s bank and employment records, to present affidavits, letters, proofs of eternal solvency—in fact, to demonstrate that a year’s worth of rent money was sitting around in one’s bank account!
He was a pancake? He took no initiative? The great man didn’t want to be bothered? Fine. There would be plenty of future opportunities (Keith had been thinking, as he extracted a check from one of the checkbooks his father kept in the top right-hand drawer of the desk in his home office) for father-pleasing displays of acumen, innovation, leadership, public speaking—all that sort of thing. Taking things in hand like this was at least an indisputable display of initiative. Who could say he was not going out there and doing what needed to be done?
How could he have anticipated that Sam, his father’s private accountant, would notice a discrepancy so slight as ten thousand dollars in one of his father’s zillions of accounts, or that he would question the signature, so zealously studied, so faithfully reproduced, on check #8703? Or that his father would fail to recognize the spirit of playful creativity exemplified by Keith’s minor—and temporary, obviously!—redistribution of funds?
* * *
He certainly hadn’t spent all that money yet, but the longer he searched for a place to live, no matter how frugal he was, the less of it was left. And therefore the less likely that any landlord would accept him. It was one of those paradoxes, he later observed to Celeste, that philosophers study.
4
Without his electronics he was a virtual amputee. Or more like someone who had awakened nearly blind and nearly deaf. The fine mesh of chats, e-mails, postings, and so on that had buoyed him along shriveled away overnight. He strained to receive the world’s breeding influx, which had sustained him as plankton sustains a whale, but it was—nowhere!
One good thing at least—not only could his father not find him, Tish couldn’t find him, either. Tish was a nice girl, he’d meant every word he’d said to her, he was sorry he’d gotten tired of looking at her, but that nonstop texting! It had been driving him nuts.
For a while, featureless clouds of static filled his ears, his lungs, hung in front of his eyes. How strange it was to find himsel
f in this barren expanse! But just as the other senses are said to intensify when vision goes, in the absence of his accustomed interface the bare, sharp vividness of things had begun to assail him; he felt like he was being etched. How great coffee was! How gross that gunk around the baseboards was! One morning he realized he was staring at his hand, marveling, as if it belonged to a stranger, to an alien creature. And was that him, sitting in the café with this Celeste person? Each time he met up with her, the moment would come when, to his amazement, he asked to see her again.
* * *
An irony had begun to bother him, he eventually mused to her. People were drawn to what they thought of as him, but it wasn’t really him, he now understood. What people were drawn to was an aggregation of qualities he’d had little hand in making or choosing, that he himself might not, as he was noticing, have a lot of respect for: his appearance, his reasonably good manners, his passable education, his general range of circumstantial, historical, evolutionary, whatever, ornaments. But he had a persistent sensation—and didn’t she agree?—that there was some rubbery little nub through which those more superficial qualities were routed—his self ?
“I don’t know,” Celeste said. “All that stuff is pretty inalienable. I mean, it’s all you, qua person, isn’t it? But obviously you’re in process. It’s interesting. Maybe you’re just turning into you. Or maybe you’re changing course. Or maybe you want to change course, or maybe you’ve got to change course because there’s an obstacle in your path or because something’s not right about the path.”
Not right? Definitely something was not right! Like, maybe he was on his way to prison? Maybe he was a congenital pancake?
“Anyhow,” she said, “one thing about all those ornaments that fate hung on you—they give you the luxury to make some choices.”
Luxury! He was a guy who didn’t even have his own apartment!
* * *
It was after their seventh date—or meeting, as Celeste called those pleasant occasions—that she invited him to move in with her. Well, not move in, exactly, but to bunk with her until he found a place of his own.
A haven, the cozy little apartment at the back of the building, with Celeste curled up, late, late, overlapping him. Was this happiness? he wondered. He felt like a pioneer; he was expanding outward toward his own confines—toward his infinitely elastic confines. Exciting. Scary . . .
It was soothing to stroke her soft hair; after tumults of love, their breathing phased into serene alignment.
Beyond the apartment’s walls, in the night sky of his closed eyes, little lights charted the streets and broad avenues, the apartments and clubs of late revelers, the tall towers, where five or six guys he knew, guys only a few years ahead of him, would be toiling, even at this hour, in their big chairs, the vast windows of their offices overlooking the city, overlooking the planet with its mines and wells, its fields and great waterways, as they steered Earth’s course by the graphs and instruments of their predecessors’ devising into the hidden future.
Hidden also from those guys was Celeste’s wild ocean of sheets, calming again now, and bleached lunar white by the film of night light that slipped in at the window, where he and she floated, safe.
. . . like a boat, Celeste murmured, as they moved off on slow waves of sleep, farther and farther from shore.
5
The second postcard arrives in Cordis’s mailbox about a week later, also in an envelope, which he tucks firmly away until he’s gotten out on the street with Moppet. Moppet’s little toenails, or whatever they’re called, skitter on the hall tiles in her haste to be out the door. His heart pounds.
Moppet makes for the sad little patch of earth in front of the building where a scrawny tree grows, no thanks to her, and pees as he tears open the envelope:
And what’s that supposed to mean, “the city barns?” Oh, wait—it must be “burns.” The city burns.
6
During the days, while Celeste was at her office, Keith continued to send out his threadbare CVs and look for a job. But the magic name he shares with his father was suddenly a liability. Because why, the personnel department at one prosperity mill, and then the next, must have wondered, had the dad not supplied an introduction? No calls back. Not one.
* * *
“Okay, so your father won’t help you out,” Celeste had said. “But that doesn’t mean he’s a criminal.”
“He’s got really, really a lot of money, though. He’s got extra money. He’s got mountains of it, he’s famous for money. He’s SAS.”
“SAS? SynthAquat Solutions? The people who poisoned all that water in Malaysia?”
Oops—maybe that wasn’t exactly how he should have explained his father to Celeste. And anyhow, it wasn’t the point. “Well, they do plenty of other stuff, too,” he protested.
“SynthAquat Solutions! No offense meant, but your father actually is a criminal.”
Tears stung his eyes—yes, his criminal father! How was he ever going to recover from the way his father spoke to him that day? He’d heard his father unleash his wrath on employees, on wives, but he’d never imagined what that would really feel like. It still sometimes flashed through his body like pain.
And in fact, if his good luck hadn’t bumped him into Celeste . . .
A terrible thought struck him. “Listen,” he said. “I can stay in your apartment while you’re gone, right?”
“Excuse me? That is, obviously I had to rent my apartment out. I mean, sorry, but to people who can pay something? I’ve already set it up through SpacesCadet. People are scheduled to be in and out the whole time I’ll be gone.”
She was leaving . . . she was really leaving. And bad enough that she was leaving, but the apartment would be, in a sense, leaving with her!
“Sorry,” Celeste said again. “But it’s not for all that long. And if you haven’t found a place by the time I’m back, I guess you can stay again. This isn’t news, is it?”
“News? I mean, you have to do what you have to do. But you know, I’ve got to get a job—I’ve got to get a job right now, any job.”
She patted him and let a little interval of silence cushion his panic. “Well, listen, you know the lady whose dog I walk?”
“That lady you work for down the hall?”
“Cordis? I don’t work for Cordis.”
“Well, but you walk her dog.”
“She’s my friend. She hates to go out, so I walk her dog.”
“Why did she get a dog if she hates to go out?” He seemed to be tumbling through the air, clawing at it for a hold.
“She didn’t get a dog. The dog was Mrs. Munderson’s, from 4B. But she forgets to eat.”
“Mrs. Munderson forgets to eat if she’s got a dog?” Oh, why couldn’t something other than this be happening? Out of all the possibilities, why would life have bothered to invent this?
“No, Cordis forgets to eat. Look, I’m really sorry. So I bring her stuff sometimes. And help her out with her bills, that kind of thing.”
“You pay that lady’s bills?”
“No, I keep track of them. Sometimes she just stacks them up and forgets about them. She’s had some hard times. Her husband disappeared almost twenty years ago. And she used to run a great bookstore, one of the very last in the city, but obviously that had to close sooner or later. Anyhow, it would be good if she had someone to check up on her and walk the dog and stuff while I’m away.”
“What, me?”
“Why not?”
“Like—what, like a personal assistant?”
Celeste looked at him, then shook her head briefly, as if she’d gotten water in an ear. “Okay, personal assistant, whatever.”
PA for the old weirdo down the hall? Well, but at least it would be something sufficiently chest-thumping to put on that pathetic CV of his: Personal Assistant. Personal Assistant to Cordis Whoever.
“Hey, but what’s this story with the husband? Did he go off with the lady in 4B, or what?”
; “Mrs. Munderson? Why would he have gone off with Mrs. Munderson? They took Mrs. Munderson away.”
* * *
And that was how Keith had learned about Ernst Friedlander and Friedlander’s quest to study the origin of language.
“The origin of language?” This, too, was confusing. “Didn’t it just come in the kit? Tool-using, bipedalism, language?”
Other animals were bipedal, Celeste reminded him, and lots of other animals, as it turned out, used tools. And obviously other animals were capable of communicating with members of their own species—in some cases even further, apparently beyond the taxonomic divides humans had worked out for them.
And although some animals were capable of figuring out how to use some human symbols to communicate with humans (though oddly humans couldn’t much figure out how to use animal techniques to communicate with animals), evidently no species but their own—humans, modern humans, Homo sapiens sapiens (an awkward classification necessitated by some initial miscalculation)—shared an innate capacity for using a flexible system of abstractions that was amenable to complex elaborations. No other species had a capacity for fitting together elements—thought entities, so to speak, mental units that could be expressed as words or phrases—to make larger expressible thought entities.
For example, Celeste said, two of these thoughtish/speech-ish units could be linked together—via this system, grammar!—to create a new, more precise, and more complex unit, which itself could generate other, even more complex units, all governed by the laws inherent to that spectacular innate capacity.
“Like noun ‘Cordis’ and verb ‘remembers.’ ‘Cordis remembers.’ Or ‘Cordis remembers her husband.’ ‘Cordis remembers her husband although he disappeared twenty years ago.’ ‘Cordis remembers her husband, who disappeared twenty years ago, although she forgets to eat the cupcake on the counter.’
“So we can formulate a lot of content—ideas, relationships between ideas, nuanced relationships between ideas, all that—with these little things, words. Grammar’s, like, an operating system?”
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