The Fearsome Particles

by Trevor Cole

  And yet now, Vicki no longer seemed as fixed in her world view. She seemed, instead, hazy. It wasn’t just the toenail trouble or her skewed grasp of time; she lacked clarity in other ways. Was Rosary, their cleaning lady, doing enough to remove the cat hair from the furniture? Vicki was undecided about this. How long should they allow Kyle to stay closed up in his room? She was unsure. Reports of bombing in the Middle East no longer elicited a crisp tsk from Vicki; nor did catching televised antique experts in absurd errors bring her bitter joy. It was as if she had stopped paying close attention to her own sensibility. Gerald happened to have his own views on some of these questions (Rosary was failing with the cat hair), but he was able to relax more when Vicki did too.

  As for Kyle, since he’d come home, he had spent most of his days and nights sequestered behind his bedroom door. In the context of a recent “off-camp event,” this constancy had seemed right enough, and certainly better than the alternative suggested by Oberly’s use of the word erratic. For much of the week, Gerald had embraced Kyle’s quiet isolation as the antithesis of erratic and therefore proof of his son’s good mental health and Oberly’s suspect judgment. He looked on it as a kind of quarantine period, during which whatever infection of anguish Kyle had picked up in Afghanistan could be cleansed out of his system.

  He wanted to talk to his son, of course. He wanted to hug him, wanted to hold his ear to Kyle’s mouth and hear all the ways the world had become harder for him, less accessible, more vicious. On the drive back from the airport, he’d tried to get Kyle to tell him what happened. Overseas, on the plane, wherever he wanted to start. “What went on, Kyle?” he’d said, glancing away from the road to look at his son, his wrists freed but his body hemmed in by the seatbelt. “They wouldn’t tell me,” he said over the tire hum, “but you can.” Kyle, though, had only smiled. And it had frightened Gerald. Because all his life Kyle had seemed to Gerald to be a boy you could reach, a boy who was more than usually receptive to the appeals of logic. Did it make sense to scream and throw food in a nice restaurant, Kyle? he would ask as Vicki took Kyle into her lap. Did it make sense to scare the waiters away so they wouldn’t bring us nice dessert? No, it didn’t. What a smart boy. Very good.

  Yes, Kyle had had his childhood moments of extreme focus, when it seemed as though he experienced the world through a long, narrow tube. But that was nothing unmanageable, that was almost a skill. And when Gerald witnessed the trouble other parents had with small children – the tantrums, the recklessness, the uncontrollable will – he had known that he had the keys to something special. And it remained his, through Kyle’s toddling years, his rambunctious years, into his teens.

  Did it make sense to throw the cordless telephone and break Mommy’s nice things?

  Did it make sense not to take notes in class?

  Did it make sense to call a girl’s house seven times and repeatedly hang up before anyone could answer? Or join after-school clubs that you never attend, or drive Mom’s car until it runs out of gas?

  No, it didn’t, Kyle. Now you’re thinking. Very good.

  All the years of Kyle’s growing up Gerald had managed to take his son by the figurative hand and pull him toward sound choices. It had only been a few months before Kyle left that this had changed, like a shift in barometric pressure, and the logic message had no longer been able to get through. Which was why Did it make sense to drop out of school and go work in Afghanistan? had never reached him.

  And it was why Gerald had watched Kyle’s face in the car, on the way home from Trenton, and felt scared, because his son hadn’t smiled in a comforting way, but in the shiny, dislocated way of someone on drugs, or unhinged, someone beyond the range of his signal. And why he thought that Kyle spending a quiet, uneventful week in his room was perhaps the best thing.

  Until he realized it wasn’t uneventful at all.

  At 5:58, according to Gerald’s watch, Sandy Beale appeared at his door and knocked on the door frame, producing a thin clack which apparently dissatisfied her because she was reaching her knuckles toward the door as he looked up.

  “Are you in the middle of something?” Sandy asked.

  “Nope.”

  “You said six, right?”

  “I did.” He tapped his computer keyboard a couple of times and shut everything down. “Come on in.”

  At the chair in front of his desk, she hesitated. “Did you want me to sit here or …?” Her gaze drifted over with a kind of longing to the small round table.

  Gerald rose. “There’s fine, if you’re more comfortable.”

  She claimed her seat and laid her folder open in front of her. With a glance out the window as he sat, she said, “It’s nice to see it’s still light out at this time of night.”

  “It’s only six.”

  “You’re right.” Sandy nodded and smiled. “I guess it just feels later. Everyone here, well almost, leaves right at five.”

  “Most of them have a long commute.”

  Sandy rolled her eyes in an expression of great empathy. “The traffic just kills. Especially when people have to get home to their families.” She shook her head. “I’m lucky I’m single. I can work as late as I want. And I don’t know about you” – here she made fervent eye contact with Gerald – “I find I get a lot more done after everyone’s gone.”

  It was Sandy’s mention of working alone that made him aware, just then, of the silence. Without the constant whirr of his computer’s fan next to him and the usual drone of ringing phones and hallway chatter from the twenty-seven staffers on the second floor, the offices of Spent Materials had taken on an ethereal air, the apprehensive quiet of something forgotten, left behind. As he became conscious of it, Gerald’s thoughts wafted off until they settled, again, on Vicki.

  As much as he’d been worried about her lately he was aware of a doubt in the back of his mind, faint, like the slip of smoke from a dud match, as to whether his concern was wholly authentic. He had to admit the possibility that being concerned for her really wasn’t the same as being troubled by her. Being infuriated, in fact, that none of his qualms or issues connected to Kyle, to her, to the house, to the cat, seemed to register with her. It was one thing to think, Oh, my wife is becoming strangely distanced from reality and maybe I should do something; it was another to think, Where the hell is my wife when I need her? And it was at times like these that Gerald, with as much guilt as resentment, wondered whether he was really the man Vicki should have married. Whether, ideally, she should have found someone more … lighthearted. If it was an issue of character, that universe of a man’s own, unique promise as a father and husband, then the question was whether his was expanding or contracting. If it had ever, once, seemed limitless, Gerald feared that the elastic gravity of his potential was now snapping back on itself, and that if it continued as it was, it would one day be nothing more than a hard, dense nut of miserableness.

  There had been a moment during their wedding reception at the Glenbridge Yacht Club – it was a panicky moment triggered by a flash of disappointment on Vicki’s face as word came that his best man, Milt Landrow, typically drunk, had fallen into the marina – when he wondered whether they were truly suited to each other and he found himself asking why she’d agreed to marry him.

  “Because,” she’d told him, “I am hopelessly optimistic.”

  Would she be happier now if she’d spent the last twenty-one years with someone less inclined to think of that as a failing?

  “So,” said Sandy. She had freed some pages from her folder and held the topmost sheet by its corner, ready.

  “Yes.”

  “My crazy idea.”

  He crossed his legs tight and leaned back. “I can’t wait.”

  She ran the fingertips of one hand down the side of her face, her clear-painted, elliptical nails drawing away unseen stray hairs. “Well, let me start by saying the fact that I’m here, talking to you, shouldn’t be any kind of reflection on Trick. I mean, he’s really busy.” She emphasized “
busy,” and in so doing, Gerald noted, seemed to de-emphasize it. “He’s going non-stop with details, all day, every day, putting out ad budget fires and trade show fires and sales meeting fires. He doesn’t have the time to play around with ‘what-if’ scenarios like this. But that’s okay because – between you and me? – this kind of big-picture strategic development thinking is what I really enjoy doing.” She’d been bearing down on this last phrase the whole time, Gerald realized now, and her voice rode up when it hit the word enjoy like a ski jumper leaping into the frosted mist.

  “So,” Sandy said again. She glanced briefly at her sheet, then frowned up at him with sudden intensity. “As a man, not as an executive at Spent Materials, but as Gerald Woodlore, what do you worry about?”

  He brushed at a knee. “Many things.”

  “Let me put it this way, who do you worry about?”

  He kept his gaze steady; he knew what she was getting at now. “My family.”

  “That’s exactly right. Of course you worry about your family. You worry about them for all kinds of reasons. You worry about them getting hurt in an accident, you worry about them getting sick.” She seemed to be trying not to smile through her seriousness, but she obviously felt things were going well, the smile was creeping through. “And you worry that there’s nothing, absolutely nothing you can do to prevent something bad from happening to them.”

  “I guess that’s true.”

  “It is true!” In her enthusiasm she slapped the table, which startled both Gerald and, apparently, herself, because she drew back, blushing. “Sorry,” she said, clearing her throat, “it’s just I’m really excited about this idea.”

  “That’s okay. Take your time.”

  She looked at her sheet for a moment; her fingers seemed to be trembling and this was perhaps why she laid the paper flat. “But Mr. Woodlore,” she began again, “Gerald, what’s not true is that you can’t do something to keep your family safe.” She pressed her eyes shut, and opened them. “A better way to put it is that there is something you can do.”

  “I’m glad to hear it.”

  “One of the major sources of human illness – and you could probably say the main source – is bacteria, dust, pollution, and other foreign particles in the air. Would you agree with that?”

  “For our purposes, all right.”

  “If we include viruses?”

  “All right.”

  She moved to a second page. “Now, our premium washable furnace filters do a pretty good job of collecting a lot of those particles as they go through the heating and cooling systems of the typical family’s house.”

  “Down to half a micron anyway.”

  “Better than most, certainly. And we promote that by advertising the particle-capturing ability of our filters with the slogan, ‘Fil-Tru gets what gets in.’ ”

  Gerald hoped that Sandy would soon move away from telling him what he already knew. He wished for that, and signalled his yearning for that by shifting in his chair and blinking like a man struggling to sustain his interest.

  “I can tell you want me to get to the point.”

  Oh, she could be a dream employee.

  She pushed the first two pages aside. “The point is, we’re not struggling to sustain market share in filters, because there we have a defined image. Our customers see our filters as helping them keep their families safe. Where we’re struggling is in our window screens, because what do our window screens actually do?”

  “Keep out bugs.”

  “Do bugs make us sick?”

  “Mosquitoes can.”

  With her eyes closed she nodded very rapidly. “Yes, yes, you’re right. Mosquitoes.”

  “Flies. Flies can spread germs.”

  “Yes, all right, but every window screen on the face of the earth keeps out flies and mosquitoes.”

  “Well –”

  “I mean that keeping out flies and mosquitoes is no big deal. It’s nothing! The stuff that hurts us, hurts your family, is way smaller than that, right? Exhaust from diesel trucks, fatty soot particles from your neighbour’s barbecue that mutate genes in mice, atmospheric dust whipped up from Outer Mongolia or some horrible nuclear test zone somewhere – all these tiny particles you can’t even see just zoom through that screen as if it wasn’t there. They come inside. You can’t stop them! You can’t control them!” She was sawing the air with a flattened hand, her hair flying. “They come in, like they’re on some covert operation, and who knows for sure that viruses like SARS or worse aren’t riding some of those particles like terrorists on a bus? And once they’re inside, what’s our defence? All we can do is hope that one day, eventually, they’ll get caught in the furnace filter. And until that day, who knows what harm they could do.”

  She stopped to catch her breath. And turned the page.

  “But those tiny invaders can only hurt us if they get inside, right? So what we need, what you need to help your family stay safe, is some way to keep those particles, those deadly, fearsome particles, out.”

  “How do we do that?”

  Sandy took a deep breath. Looked right at him. “Put filters on the windows.”

  Gerald gave nothing away. “Filters on the windows.”

  “That’s right. Instead of window screens, you cover every window in the house with a great big air filter.” Her thin mouth moseyed into a smile.

  “The whole window?”

  “Yes!” cried Sandy. “No half measures, no compromises! Every window, completely covered!”

  “But, there’s no such thing as a transparent filter.”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  “Well, I think it does matter, Sandy. If you put filters over the windows, people won’t be able to see outside.”

  She slapped the table again, deliberately, and leaned toward him with a volcanic glare. “What matters more to you, Mr. Woodlore, the health and safety of your family or … a nice view?” Then she sat back, aflame with triumph.

  The deserted offices of Spent Materials seemed to ring, church-like, as the passion of Sandy Beale hovered o’er all. Gerald’s mind was working on myriad fronts. To Sandy, he said, “What about natural light?”

  She didn’t hesitate. “They’ll be translucent.”

  He scratched his chin. “Our furnace filters are too thick to install in windows.”

  “Compress them.”

  Here’s where he had her. “But compressing the filters would diminish their filtering ability.”

  She smiled again. He was starting to not like it as much. “So, you agree,” she said, “that you would want the best possible air quality protection covering your windows.”

  “I think –”

  “You accept that a high-density air filter, made of woven translucent fibres, would be a more effective safeguard against particle invasion than even the best window screen.”

  “What we –”

  “And you admit that without such protection, the family you love is vulnerable.”

  He put his hands up. “Okay, Sandy, this is a really interesting idea, all right? And I’m impressed with your willingness to, not just think outside the box but, you know, crush it.”

  Her heat subsided a little, and her expression turned demure. “Thank you.”

  “I think, though, as a product” – he reached out and patted her papers lightly – “it has some big issues.”

  “But –”

  “I just don’t see the retailers and the contractors and the window manufacturers we work with accepting the principle that people are going to give up the ability to look out their windows in order to breathe cleaner air.”

  Sandy huffed. “I gave you the rationale. You make people choose – health or beauty.” She snatched up a piece of paper and waved it in the air. “You show people enlarged pictures of the stuff that’s coming into their houses. Humungous ugly alien-looking things. Then you say, ‘Do you want your new baby breathing this just so you can watch the sunset?’ Okay, so some people will choose the
sunset, but you know what? If we do this right, they’ll feel guilty about it.”

  Gerald sighed as he shook his head. “It’s too out there. It’s too big a risk.”

  She studied him for a moment, and then her gaze fell to the table. “Look, you’re absolutely right” – her voice had taken on the palliative texture of a cello – “it would be a big gamble. I mean, it’s an opportunity to take ownership of a value, like Ford tried to do with ‘quality’ and Smith Barney did with ‘hard work.’ Spent Materials could own ‘protecting your family’s health, above all.’ But there’s no doubt, it’s the kind of risky, go-for-broke move that would only be made by a company with nothing to lose.”

  Sandy lifted her face toward him, and Gerald feared then that he knew what she was getting at. He feared that he had received exactly the message she intended to convey. He hadn’t had a chance to finish his own analysis of the market share percentages, and now Sandy’s expression told Gerald he didn’t need to.

  “We’re at the bottom,” he said.

  She held up two fingers, then spread out her whole hand. Two … five. Two and a half per cent.

  “You know this for a fact?”

  She nodded solemnly. Two and a half per cent. Gerald felt the acid in his stomach foam up like beer in a warm bottle. He did everything he could, paid attention to every operational detail in order to keep the company running smoothly, and it galled him that it wasn’t enough. It galled him that Trick Runiman would attempt to slip this leper of a number by him and imagine he could do it. But it galled him most of all that his instincts had warned him a problem like this was developing, and he hadn’t done a damn thing about it.

  In his frustration Gerald pressed back in his chair and craned his neck so that he faced the suspended ceiling, and was not surprised to see, in the amber light of evening, a few, brazen motes of dust larking in the air. To be aware of a thing was, he well knew, to be plagued by it.

  2

  The Lightenham Avenue house gave off whiffs of banking. Or perhaps more specifically, international finance. Vicki wanted to be sure, though, and she still had an opportunity to change her mind. Showings wouldn’t begin for another ten days, and though she’d selected and had delivered many of the necessary furnishings based on her early banking/finance impressions, few of these pieces were in place. She could order back the movers tomorrow morning and make wholesale replacements if she deemed it necessary. If at the last moment she picked up something, say, insurancey.