Layman's Report

by Eugene Marten

  He bought antacids; his ulcer was having its say and the news wasn’t good. The prison Doktor, a grouchy son of a bitch with a thick white mustache, advised Fred to avoid stress and watch his diet, but do so here and you would watch yourself starve to death. One hot meal a day, at noon. At night the dark bread, five slices or so, and two of cheese or sausage. Then nothing till noon the next day. He was always hungry but they knew what they were doing; starvation affected the memory, thinking—he would be unable to mount a proper defense. The Spaniard who ate cockroaches said they were high in protein, gave you short bursts of manic energy. Like a drug, he said, and asked Fred why he was there.

  “I told the truth.”

  “This is why you have no friends.”

  “There are worse things than being alone,” Fred said.

  The staff was efficient, humane, fair. They could not have been raised by men who threw children into ovens.

  Church services every Sunday, Protestant or Catholic. The sermons were in German but at first Fred was not deterred; he attended both until, perusing the Bible the man from the NPD had given him, he found the passage of Corinthians in which Paul advises against prayer in a foreign tongue.

  A sharp, chemical taste. Bitter. And their legs would get lodged in your teeth.

  He was thirty-four days in Mannheim when the local court lost venue of his case. It was transferred to the Landgericht, a grim concrete block of a building with a steel upper story, vertical slits for windows. Fred was granted a new bail hearing and someone had gotten him a lawyer, a tanned, heavyset character from New Orleans with a shaved head and an eyepatch. The man from the NPD was allowed to translate. The state attorney, himself a rising star, argued strenuously that Fred was a flight risk, in the end no less dangerous than the bomb-builders and pipe-swingers he would incite.

  “My client should be so accomplished,” Fred’s lawyer said, having represented a busload of just such miscreants, and in the end the Vorsitzende Richter allowed Fred to post bond.

  After the hearing they stood out in the cold in front of the courthouse, a Baroque palace across the street. Trolley tracks. The lawyer from New Orleans wore a black leather trenchcoat and a suit and tie and an aftershave so strong even the northern wind could not entirely disperse it. He smelled like America.

  He scratched irritably under the eyepatch, as if he wore it only for effect, then handed Fred an envelope.

  “There are thirty-three extraditable offenses listed in the treaty between this nation and ours,” the lawyer said in that accent that wasn’t just Southern. “The one you’ve been charged with ain’t one of em.”

  Fred waited for a trolley car to pass. “What’s in the envelope?”

  “What envelope?” his lawyer said.

  Fred boarded a Lufthansa 747 in Frankfurt the next morning, a nine-hour flight during which the blinding white sun never set, as if time were suspended and all destinations deferred. By early afternoon he was standing without luggage on the porch of the duplex they’d rented after the fire. He tasted the bitter taste jet lag left in his mouth, and everywhere a slight shimmer as of objects superimposed upon themselves. The mailbox was empty. He got out his keys and unlocked the door and went inside.

  He wasn’t home anymore. She’d taken everything except the carpet it had come with. There wasn’t even a smell. He walked slowly through rooms like a prospective tenant and couldn’t hear himself. He looked for a note and found none, only his mail stacked on the kitchen counter. He took stock. Considered. Sat on the living room floor with his back against the wall. It was cold but he barely noticed this either; he was Fred, international fugitive from justice, flipping through his mail, but at first the only envelope he opened was the one from the lawyer his wife had retained. He thought for a moment of the guy who’d organized the rally, the man he’d marched with, but really he hadn’t seemed her type.

  At least they hadn’t changed the locks. But what had become of the Buick?

  He was suddenly very dizzy, like he’d been spinning in place and had just stopped. He hadn’t slept at all on the plane, hadn’t slept well in weeks. He lay down on the living room floor of an American duplex with his mail pillowed under his head, and didn’t wake up even when the landlord arrived with a family of four looking for an extra bedroom. It was the children who discovered him and, after trying unsuccessfully to rouse him by pulling his coat and lightly kicking his leg, went back to the kitchen and reported to their parents that a bum was sleeping on the floor in the big room.

  “…banality of evil…”

  —Variety

  “A study of hubris, the myth of objectivity, and the fatal attraction of…attention and flattery.”

  —The New York Times

  “The year’s best documentary that isn’t really a documentary…Genius.”

  —CNN.COM

  “…banality of evil.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  So many towns named for saints. The sun went down early, but when it rose it pulled temperatures with it into the fifties and sixties, and there was so much green that winter here was just a cold rainy summer back East. When Fred arrived a furnished studio efficiency was waiting for him, and so was a used Ford Escort. (It was understood he would take over the car note and the rent, month to month.) No phone. The job was an hour’s drive through the mountains to an office parkway just outside Burbank. Paved black driveways, palm trees, long winter shadows. An arrangement of single-story white buildings with polarized windows, company names and addresses stenciled in identical white lettering. He had to ask the groundskeeper where Parametric Solutions, Inc. was.

  The door was propped open. He walked in on a new carpet, under a drop ceiling glowing with rectangles of fluorescent light. Two rows of desks as in a classroom. Two rows of people at the desks talking into phones, some wearing sweaters or coats or hugging themselves because for some reason the air conditioning was on. Almost no one looked up. A big guy approached Fred like he was going to tackle him. He wore crisp white sleeves and a tie and had gelled his thinning blond hair. He brought himself to a halt and said, “Tell me you’re here to fix the compressor.”

  Fred gave him the letter. The big guy looked at it moving his lips, looked momentarily disappointed, then shook Fred’s hand. “Welcome aboard,” he said. “Cold enough for you? We’re working on it,” and he took Fred into his office. He was the office manager.

  At the phones they were asking questions.

  “You’ll start on the phones,” the office manager told Fred.

  “I was under the impression it was a consulting position.”

  “I’m sure it will become that,” the office manager said, leaning around a computer, “but everyone starts in the call center.” He passed a W-4 across his desk and two or three sheets of paper stapled together. A list of questions.

  “Some kind of survey?” Fred said.

  “You could say that.”

  “What is it for?”

  “My guess is some kind of demographic thing. Establishing a possible test market?”

  Fred looked at the office manager.

  “I know,” the office manager said, “I know. This is just the way he works. He doesn’t show his cards all at once.” He leaned in and folded his hands. “Let me tell you something: he may not know himself. Yet. He believes in discovering needs, not inventing them.”

  “Who is he?” Fred asked.

  “A genius.”

  “You’ve met him?”

  “Not yet.” The office manager looked suspicious. “Who did you talk to?”

  “Some of his people. I had this business card.” Then he had a letter.

  “It’s just the way he works.” The office manager leaned back. “You may have already seen him, shook his hand somewhere without knowing it. I was pitching minor league ball when they called me. You’ve heard the expression ‘fisher of men’? Well add women…” He smiled warily, as at a joke he was too fond of repeating. “Anyway he’s a genius, okay? But e
veryone starts on the phones. We’re working on the AC—bad compressor or something.” He said the handsets were also just temporary; computers and autodialers were on the way. Socializing with the other associates during business hours was not encouraged. He did not use the word employee.

  Fred sat down at a desk near the back of the room. The light over his head was bruised with dim patches like bad news on an X-ray. A list of numbers. A stack of answer sheets. The phone had a lot of buttons and the office manager showed him which ones mattered. Fred studied the questions. Listened around. He went over the questions again and dialed a number.

  “Hello?” a woman said.

  “Hello,” Fred said. “Am I speaking to the head of household?” You were supposed to sound like you were smiling.

  She sighed. “Depends who you ask.” She didn’t sound like she was smiling. “Who is this?”

  Fred recited the name of the company. “Feel free to end the call at any time.”

  She laughed cruelly. “Okay,” she said, and hung up.

  He dialed the next number. This time, when he said, “Do you have time to answer some questions?” he did not extend the option of ending the call.

  “What kind of questions?” A voice of uncertain gender, of a certain resignation.

  “What kind of questions do you most enjoy answering?” Fred asked. “a) Those with yes or no answers? b) Those involving quantities and measurements? c) Personal preference questions? d) Multiple choice questions? or e) No preference?”

  “It would depend.”

  No preference. Fred made a mark on the answer sheet. “What is the size of the household?”

  “You mean how many people?” the voice said. “Four if that’s what you mean.”

  “How many people in the household are over the age of eighteen?”

  “Three.”

  “Three?”

  “Make that two. Sometimes I think he—”

  “Two.”

  “Yes, sometimes I think…how many questions did you say?”

  Fred wrote two. “Feel free to end the call at any time.” He looked back down. “How many household members use public transportation?”

  “One.”

  “Male or female.”

  “She takes the bus.”

  “What is her favorite color?”

  After a second the voice said, “I guess that’s kind of a gray area,” and laughed with an abandon out of all proportion to its wit.

  “Should I put undecided?”

  “Kind of a mint…”

  “Can you be more specific, please?”

  “Can we come back to it?”

  “Do any of the household members who use public transportation and are over the age of eighteen have any physical impairments?”

  The voice asked Fred to repeat that one, then it said, “She gets migraines.”

  Fred made a mark. Migraines were not on the list. “Do you have any pets?”

  “Sure. Nosebleeds, too.”

  “How many hours of television would you say the household watches per week? On the average.”

  “Aspirin doesn’t help. Maybe she should get a CAT scan or something.”

  “Do you listen to more than one radio station?”

  “Can we come back to that one? Maybe sometimes you’re just better off not knowing.”

  Fred made a mark.

  “Do you have a favorite radio station?”

  “Classic rock.” Slightly affronted, as if somehow Fred should have known.

  A creek wandered through the parkway looking for a body of water in which to empty itself, and a footbridge spanned it a hundred feet or so from Parametric Solutions, Inc. Fred took his breaks on the bridge, smoking, looking down into the creek, watching tendrils of underwater life undulate in the clear current. The second time a woman was standing there, doing what he was doing. She seemed annoyed at his presence. He stared down into the water, flicked an ash into it and wondered aloud how far away the ocean was. She didn’t wonder back, and when he looked up she’d gone. A cigarette butt floating downstream. He went back to his desk and looked up at the ceiling tiles. Water stains. Leaky return duct maybe, but he kept the thought to himself and continued asking strangers questions. Driving home in the evening he was still asking them: Does the household eat its meals together? Do you feel safe in your neighborhood at night? There was no end to them, it seemed, and if there were would he then hear the questions not on the list?

  He didn’t like the Escort. It drove like a Dodgem.

  The apartment building, actually an extended-stay motel, was a two-story stucco rectangle built around a courtyard with a swimming pool. The palms, bougainvillea. If other employees (who were not referred to as such) from Parametric Solutions, Inc. lived there, Fred never saw them, but some of the tenants were migrant workers and others were aspiring actors or screenwriters or standup comics or musicians. You heard them practicing lines through thin walls. Pitches. Next door was a middle-aged man who wore a cowboy hat and tank top and tattoos he’d gotten in prison doing time for armed robbery. He’d had a bit role in a Lethal Weapon iteration. He was represented by an aspiring agent who was also the building maintenance man, who wore a pager and often smelled of sweat.

  The courtyard was the scene of great social activity in the evening. Laughter, mariachi, drinking and dancing; the drained, uncovered pool filled with people, lawn chairs, a barbecue grill. Mutant cannibals came home from the twenty-third century and jumped in, still hungry. People left their doors open. Fred didn’t, though he watched for a while from the balcony. When he went back into his studio efficiency he could have sworn things were not as he’d left them in the morning, as if someone else occupied it in his absence.

  He heard splashing in his sleep. Kids banged on the doors and ran away.

  After nearly a week of asking strangers questions over the phone, he got up one overcast morning and went down to the parking lot and saw a man there looking at the Escort. A red kerchief was tied around his neck.

  “Can I help you?” Fred said. The guy spun, then jumped into the passenger side of a pickup truck two spaces away. The truck pulled out. Fred watched it, tried to get a license number. When he got back to work an hour later the associates of Parametric Solutions, Inc. were standing outside on the sidewalk or sitting in their cars. They were watching the groundskeeper scrape the company name off the door with WD-40 and a razor blade. The windows were dark and Fred walked up to the glass and put his face to it. The desks were still there but the phones were gone, disconnected lines lying across the carpet like severed umbilicals. Fred turned to his former coworkers, who could now also be referred to as unemployed. Two of them were holding each other. One was crying. A man attired too impeccably as a woman to be called a crossdresser said, “You know as much as we do.”

  “They said they make me administrator,” a man with a strange accent said. His voice was filled with murder. The office manager was nowhere in sight.

  Fred drove back to his apartment. He found the letter he’d shown the office manager, went down to the payphone by the rental office. Someone was there—someone always was—so he walked down the street to a gas station and called the number in the letter. A recording said Parametric Solutions, Inc. was being relocated, to bear with them till the new address could be made available. Even the recording sounded skeptical. Fred left his number and stood at the payphone for an hour. That night there was another party and he watched from his balcony. Below him two young women stood talking, holding cigarettes and green bottles. One of them, migrant or aspiring, dark of hair and eye with Spanish blood, looked up at him and smiled for perhaps one second, then resumed her conversation, her gray smoke, her green glass, and when Fred withdrew from the rail he was also backing away from the brink, for sometimes one second is all that is called for. The rest is music.

  The next day it rained and he stayed inside, running out of groceries. The day after that he drove to the gas station and put five dollars in his tank,
then sat in Dunkin Donuts nursing coffee and studying the letter. There was an address. Barstow. He went back to his apartment but when he tried to open the door he couldn’t turn the knob; it was twice as big as it had been in the morning. They’d put something on it, a big metal shell that spun loosely when you turned it and didn’t open anything.

  The ex-armed robber was sitting on the balcony reading something called Flowers of Romance. “I can get you in if you need your effects,” he offered.

  “Wouldn’t want you to get in any trouble on my account,” Fred said. His neighbor told him to suit himself and Fred went down to the manager’s office. A sign said he would be back in an hour—unless he got the part. Fred got in the Escort, already cast in his role. All he could do now was drive to the address on the letter. He didn’t care who owned what anymore, only who could pay him his week’s pay.

  Heading up 14 he looked in the rearview mirror and saw a pickup maybe three lengths back. Then two. He slowed to let it pass but the truck slowed as well, kept a steady distance. Arid suburbs on his left. He wondered if it was the truck he’d seen in the parking lot the other day, and when he turned right it followed him into desert outland like an alter ego. He turned off again on an unmarked road, the body of the car leaning like it would detach itself from the frame, then again, and in another ten minutes he’d lost the truck and himself in the Mojave. It wasn’t hot outside but the sun was starting to cook him through the winter cool and he rolled down the window. Kept looking in the mirror. He hated the Escort now, hated anti-lock brakes and power steering—they were for people who don’t know how things work. He hated the desert. Finally he pulled over and it stopped. He went into the glove compartment but the map was locked in a room in what was now the past. The desert started again on its own terms.

  He sat a while trying to think his way to 58. Looked up. Someone was coming and then the pickup truck pulled off about a hundred feet behind him. The man with the red kerchief got out and headed off the road, tugging at his zipper. Got behind a cluster of squat trees with leaves like bayonets. Fred took his keys out of the ignition, got out of his car and walked back toward the truck. He heard a loud buzzing sound and wasn’t sure if it came from the telephone lines overhead or some other kind of life.