A waiter came with more champagne. “None for me,” Fred’s wife said. She was diabetic, thank you. A recent development.
“1 or 2?” the girlfriend of the man voted Most Likely To Go To Prison asked.
“My auntie’s Type 1,” she said, and seemed grimly proud. Her voice turned grave: “Every thirty seconds, a leg is lost to diabetes.” And a brief silence ensued, as if they awaited the thud of a limb.
After the main course the class vice-president made the rounds, lurching from table to table with a glass, squinting myopically at name tags. He came to Fred’s wife and squinted at her chest and asked who her homeroom teacher was.
“It’s not me, it’s my husband,” she said, pointing.
“Gonna do a little dancing?” the class vice-president asked.
“I have to watch my feet,” she said. “I’m Type 2.” It seemed to have given her life new meaning.
“Try the cheesecake,” the vice-president said and bumped his way to the table where the class sweethearts sat. He was in auto parts.
“Maybe a sliver…” Fred’s wife said, and everyone else ordered the mousse. Fred had another glass of champagne.
Then there were games, contests, prizes. They matched the baby picture to the graduate, answered trivia questions, raced to unscramble the names of the top ten songs their senior year. A slideshow. Lip syncing. The music started again and there was dancing. The girlfriend of the man voted Most Likely To Go To Prison wheeled her boyfriend out in front of the band, took both his hands and turned him in half-circles, slow and fast. She let go of him and swung her hips around the chair, clapping, then climbed into it and straddled him, danced in his desiccated lap. The man who’d been voted Least Likely To Succeed watched through a video camera, and the husband of the woman who’d had algebra with Fred said, “You think he can feel it down there?”
“You can always ask him,” Fred said, and the husband of the woman with whom he’d had algebra said, “Someone should run over my legs.”
Fred and his wife slow-danced once, in the summer wind.
When she’d gone back to the table in deference to her disease, he drifted to the edges of the room and stood at the margins of conversations, right hand opening and closing, waiting politely to be noticed. When he was they were kinder than he’d expected, than perhaps he’d hoped they would be. Some of them seemed to remember him, or were polite enough to pretend. They seemed to want to be impressed: “Are you the guy?” but no, hadn’t seen it—heard about it at the icebreaker. Was he there? They consulted the program. They were all in the same boat now, and it was a lifeboat, without apparent capacity; there was always exactly room for one more.
The woman who’d been drum majorette said, “60 Minutes, right?” and Fred didn’t bother to correct her; perhaps there wasn’t room for everything. She was drunk. Then someone thought to ask if he was the Mystery Guest.
“If I was I wouldn’t want to spoil it for you,” Fred said, and they nodded. He was another kind of mystery—a stranger who’d been on TV. But the question renewed the topic of the evening, and after a few minutes he was able to slip away under its cover as discreetly as he’d arrived, picture untaken, glass empty, heading back toward his wife who sat with the husband of the woman with whom he’d had algebra.
“They won’t know who you are if they don’t know who you were,” a voice said en route, and Fred, slipping past empty tables, turned.
The speaker was not familiar to him. If they’d shared any classes, even a homeroom or study hall, Fred could not recall. A man sitting alone at an empty table. He was not familiar to anyone else either for he wasn’t in the yearbook, had not participated in any activities, had not distinguished himself athletically nor academically. He’d never missed a day of school, had posed no disciplinary problems nor achieved social distinction, and graduated with no honors other than Perfect Attendance. He’d changed little, perhaps least of them all. He lived in his parents’ home, was adequately employed, had never married, hardly traveled, had neither suffered nor celebrated in excess. Like most of the class he had not been voted Most Likely To do or be anything; fading into oblivion was not a category on the ballot, but oblivion was where he’d begun.
“Excuse me?” Fred said.
“I thought you held your own,” the man who hadn’t been voted anything said.
“I think they’re a little drunk.”
“20/20,” the man said, a little impatient now. “You didn’t embarrass yourself.”
Fred thanked him and bent down to see if he was wearing a name, but there was no tag, no introduction, no offered hand.
“I took it off,” the man said. “I know who I am.”
“Well good for you,” Fred said. “We should all know this.”
“They didn’t mention Toronto.”
“Toronto,” Fred said, and here needed no explanation. “No, they didn’t. Guess they decided it was a little off point.” The point was a botched electrocution in Florida. He’d been sought out, consulted, interviewed. Stone Phillips called him chief off-camera.
“That’s an interesting way to make a living,” the man observed.
“Everybody’s good at something,” Fred said.
“So how’s business, Mr. Death?” As if suit and glass were cloak and scythe.
“A little slow these days,” Fred admitted, nodding his head, and said, “Fred.”
“You’re a doer, not a viewer,” the man said. “That’s something my mother says.”
“And what do you do?”
“Watch TV.”
“I mean for a living.”
“Everybody’s good at something,” the man said, and that was the extent of it.
Fred nodded. He looked across the room where his wife was, but couldn’t tell if she was looking back.
“They didn’t say anything about the Report, either,” the man said.
“You’ve read it?” Fred said.
“I never read books,” the man said.
“You watch TV,” Fred said.
“I read every word,” the man said.
“Well I guess maybe you wouldn’t call it a book,” Fred said.
“It’s more than a book,” the man said with the condescension of the utterly powerless. But he seemed to understand that the author is sometimes last to know.
“Well thank you,” Fred said. He waited. “I don’t suppose you’re the…”
The man shook his head and might have smiled. “If I was it’d be a different kind of party.”
Fred started to ask and stopped. He looked across the room again.
“You don’t have to stay,” the man said.
“Just looking in on my wife,” Fred said. “She has a condition.”
The man looked. “Just nature taking its course.”
“That something your father says?” Fred said. Must have been the champagne.
“Dad’s got a mouthful of dirt,” the man said. “But then I guess he would know.” There was a commotion across the room, and Fred looked back toward the corner he’d just left. A shout of disgust, uneasy laughter: the woman who’d been drum majorette seemed to have thrown up, and the man voted Least Likely To Succeed was looking unhappily at his shoes. Fred turned back to the man who’d read the Report; he wasn’t looking that way, nor was he looking at Fred, who remained a moment longer, said, “Well say hello to your mother,” then returned to the table where his wife sat and stayed there the rest of the evening.
Eventually, the class vice-president was unconscious, head down at the officers’ table. Some of the balloons had broken free and floated up to the ceiling, rolling around on invisible currents like disembodied thoughts. Beneath them a slur of voices, laughter, sobbing, apologies, just one more for the scrapbook, for the road. The band broke the spell with songs of the present, like an alarm clock in a dream. The evening was drawing to a close—four hours and thirty years gone by already—but almost no one had left, and they’d all but forgotten about the Mystery Guest. Th
en the woman voted Most Likely To Become A Teacher ran in from the parking lot, said a long black limo was pulling up outside.
“Thank you for calling National Engineering, Inc. All lines are busy. At the tone, please leave your name, number, and a detailed message, and someone will get back to you as soon as possible.”
[Tone.]
[Hangs up.]
[Tone.]
[Breathing.]
[Tone.]
“Fuck you Heil Hitler.”
[Tone.]
[Squealing sound.]
[Tone.]
“This is for Fred. Hi, Fred, this is Sue at Jiffy Cleaners & Tailors? Your clothes are ready. One suit, one shift, two sweaters, one comforter. We couldn’t do much with the ink but we talked about that, okay? We’re open Monday through Friday, nine to six, and Saturday, ten to five. Okay, thank you.”
[Tone.]
[Hangs up.]
There were two of them. They never looked at him. He didn’t know what color their eyes were. He would steal glances just to see, and when he did they weren’t looking back. They were both medium build, but one of them had olive skin while the other was pale—a redhead. Go figure. He wasn’t sure what that might mean. They were younger men, though it was hard to tell their ages exactly—early thirties, he guessed, but thirty wasn’t what it used to be. It was hard to get a good look; he was at the counter and they always took a booth. He had to turn his head on some pretext, and of course you couldn’t stare. He observed them in increments, put them together in components: denim, chinos, sunglasses, sideburns, brown leather. They were casual. He tried to listen for an accent when they were conversing or kidding the waitress, the one who’d taken his wife’s place, but they seemed to keep it short, to maintain a volume so you couldn’t be sure. Probably trained that way.
He’d see them at the diner. Might have seen them somewhere else but he couldn’t be sure, they were good at being anybody. When they left and the gal who’d replaced his wife refilled his cup, he’d ask her if she knew them. Said he was just curious, that they looked familiar. He couldn’t remember her name.
Q: What was the name of Christopher Columbus’ dog?
She stuck her thumb, squeezed a drop onto the strip. She stuck herself three or four times a day—sometimes in the middle of the night. She got home late and couldn’t just go right to sleep, so she sat in the kitchen watching tapes, sticking her thumb. She sat with her feet up. You had to take care of your feet—it was a matter of every thirty seconds. She kept them clean, kept her nails trim and used lotion but not between the toes. You couldn’t sit on register so she wore custom-molded shoes with special inlays, arch straps and collars. At home she sat in the kitchen with her face in a thirteen-inch screen, drinking Diet Coke with them up, her back to the front room, in her smock.
Unwinding, rewinding. She put the strip in the meter.
He sat in the front room with the little people, her little friends, in front of the twenty-five-inch. He liked to smoke in the living room, liked doing his work to the news. Things were not his fault. (Her back was not to him.) He’d gotten her the machine so she could sit in the kitchen and not in his smoke; for her black-and-white was color enough. He made the tapes for her—she liked the old ones best—The Saint, The Fugitive, Highway Patrol. She loved Broderick Crawford’s no-nonsense gravel, she loved the one-armed man, and who doesn’t love an English accent?
She hit rewind. Things happen so fast: one second you’re at the wholesale club buying twelve pounds of ground sirloin, getting lightheaded, the faces around you blurring and babbling. Then you’re lying on your back in a white room, a pale figure leaning over you, but instead of the voice of light there was a harsh Filipino accent: “You blood is too much swit! Is too much shoogah!” She could barely understand him. But before the whiteness there was nothing, not even that. Everything just stopped, then started again in a new way—for good, and barely in English.
a) Pinto
b) Isabella
c) Leonardo
d) Bubbles
She took out the strip. She took out the tape. She could open the fridge without getting up. The pens were in the fridge with the Diet Coke. The pens were better than needles because you just had to click them, only they wouldn’t go through cloth. You had to take them out fifteen minutes before so it wouldn’t sting. She took out a Diet Coke. She checked her feet with a mirror. She checked the numbers on the meter and put in another tape.
She opened the can. Bonanza.
The little people sat on a shelf.
He said he was going to get her a new machine, one that played discs instead. Progress was constantly being made, things being improved upon; you just had to wait till the price went down. He kept up. He had a computer. It was in his office in the living room—more of a nook really, a nick in the wall—and it was equipped with something she forgot what to call, but at night when he was in bed and she wasn’t ready to sleep, or pretend to, or for what he was ready for, she could go into the living room and sit at his desk, and she would dial a number without dialing, press Enter and enter, ride long-distance lines to other cities, houses, rooms, to evenings and mornings where people sat before other screens that lit up their faces, perhaps their lives, playing the game. In the game they would answer questions that tested their knowledge of past and present events, of persons living or dead, of Christopher Columbus, and more than one player played, they would each take a turn, and it was almost like having them over except better in that they weren’t, in that they couldn’t smoke or eat or drink things you would have to get them, and they wouldn’t have to see you and smell your feet and think thoughts about you, everyone was their essence, particles lighting up screens, faces, voids: UPANYWAY, BIGBRO, MRCOFFEE, QUIZARD.
She was FREDSGIRL. He took care of her and she took care of her feet, collected the little people. She liked the boy and girl people—Dearly Beloved, Smart Little Sister, A Star for You—and especially the ones from the Inspirational Collection—Celestial Dreamer Music Box was perhaps her favorite, though if anyone asked she would of course say she loved them all the same.
Q: What is Charles Bronson’s real name?
The answering machine was next to the computer. He needed it for business purposes, but he didn’t get so many business calls these days. He watched a lot of news. People left other kinds of messages, and he’d set it so you couldn’t hear the message being left. She wanted to unlist their number. He told her to let him worry about it, she had enough on her mind; her feet, her blood, her trouble sleeping; what she wouldn’t tell him and what he wouldn’t hear.
She had her own name. She moved from machine to machine.
At Revco she would pick up the microphone and say, “Price check on Register Two,” or “Security to Zone One.”
Broderick Crawford would say, “Ten-four!Ten-four!Ten-four!”
A golf course and a village of outlet stores had been built over the ruin where they’d once gone plinking, so they went to a firing range instead. There were twelve bays but on Sunday, if you were a member, you could have the whole range to yourself for an hour and you could bring a guest. The warden was a member. He was no longer a warden. He’d retired and grown a goatee and had brought along a case of pistols of mostly foreign make: Ruger, Norinco, a Bulgarian-made Makarov, two Berettas. He seemed to have given up on revolvers entirely.
Fred brought one piece, a short-barreled .32 that had belonged to a veterinarian. It was not a weapon designed for long-range accuracy and the warden looked at it and said, “It’s been a while, but isn’t that what they used to call a Saturday Night Special?”
“Took out Franz Ferdinand,” Fred said. “If it was gun enough to start World War One…” He kept it pointed at the floor. “In a defensive confrontation you want something that’s easy to use.”
“You want something that’s not gonna blow up in your face,” the warden said.
“Things have a way of doing that anyway,” and they stood at the firing line, the parti
tions narrow like doorways without doors. The warden leaned back.
“Well?” he said.
“Well what?” Fred said.
“I’m told it makes me look like Colonel Sanders.”
“I thought that’s what you were going for,” Fred said and slipped his goggles on over his glasses, looked like someone whose vision was so enhanced he could see wavelengths invisible to the average person. “I see a couple of guys at the diner just about every time I go there. The other day I saw them at the Shell station.”
“Couple guys,” the warden said.
“I’m not sure,” Fred said, “but I think they were at the wholesale club, too.”
“Well it’s cheaper to buy in bulk,” the warden said.
“Could be,” Fred said. “Could be routine surveillance, harassment—you know they’re experts at psychological warfare.”
“They.”
“Mossad,” Fred said and slipped on his earmuffs and shot six rapid rounds into the silhouette at the back of the range. The warden raised his Beretta and fired almost in unison as if at a common foe, and in the aftermath of humming blue air there was the smell of fireworks and the targets dancing to stillness. They reeled them in.
Fred studied the wounds he would have made. The warden said, “Maybe you should bend your front knee a little more.”
“In a defensive confrontation,” Fred said and the warden turned his back on the rest of it, went to the long table at the long window behind which the rangemaster sat. He lifted the Colt from its case—his lone American arm—and asked after Fred’s wife. As if there would be any change of subject.
“Still at the till,” Fred said. He pushed out the cylinder of the revolver and the spent casings rattled onto the floor like loose change. “Three to eleven.”
“Not a bad thing,” the warden said, a little unsure. “Keeping busy…”
“She’s not doing it out of boredom,” Fred said. “Told me the other night a van pulled into the parking lot and just sat in the back corner with the fog lights on. No plates. Drove in circles for about five minutes, then flashed the brights through the storefront and took off. Said it felt like they were winking at her.”
Layman's Report Page 17