Amateur Barbarians

by Robert Cohen

  “They’re stripping me blind, aren’t they? It’s one humiliation after the other.”

  “You’re not helping your cause much. What’s this business about fingerprints? Your buddy Bruce Germaine says you got his deputy all worked up.”

  “All I said was, run over to the drugstore and get a new ink pad.”

  “They don’t use ink anymore, Ted. It’s a digital computer program now.”

  “Well, the digital program didn’t work. According to the digital program, I barely have fingerprints. My right hand was borderline, and it couldn’t even read the prints on my left. They said it happens sometimes with older people. The prints just dry up. Older people. Those wheezing, pathetic specimens…”

  “I’m sure it was just a mechanical glitch.”

  “Have you any idea how awful it is, Fiona, to lose your fingerprints? I mean, all those neat, swervy little lines—where do they go?”

  “Something tells me your lines were never so neat in the first place,” she said. “Anyway, how about concentrating on your family for a change? The judge can still bar you from contact with Mimi, you know. You could wind up living down at the Sugar House Motel with the other degenerates.”

  “Hell, maybe I should. There’s free cable.”

  “Tell that to your wife. Tell that to your daughter.”

  “They’re not terribly interested in talking to me at the moment is my impression. How about you?”

  “I’m not very interested in talking to you either,” Fiona said. “But give them a chance. They’re strong women. More unflappable than most. We both know they’ll be there when you need them.”

  “As opposed to me you mean. I’m the flappable, one right? Maybe I should just flap off somewhere with these dirty old wings. What do you think? Everyone’s life would be easier.”

  Fiona shrugged and gathered up her bag. He could see that she was genuinely weary of him now.

  “And if I take a pass on the counseling and probation, what happens then? If I say took some sort of trip. They wouldn’t chase me, would they? They wouldn’t even care.”

  “Don’t make becoming a fugitive from the law sound like a virtue. As an officer of the court, I’m obligated to enforce its decisions. As a friend, I’d remind you of your responsibilities to your family and your community.”

  He reached for her hand. “And as a close friend?”

  Despite herself, she laughed. “We’re not that sort of friends, darling. Not by a mile.”

  He nodded. She was right, they were not that sort of friends. Which was too bad: he could use one. A buddy, a fellow traveler. But it seemed the next step was his to take alone.

  7

  Midworld

  Sometimes, in fact most of the time, in fact all of the time, it seemed to Oren that he’d watched far too many dramas in his life and acted in far too few; that for all the films he’d studied or worked on in his twenties, all the abstruse criticism and theory he’d committed to memory, he had learned nothing of practical value, nothing of use, and was now condemned to play out on an endless loop, in dreams and in life, the dreariest and least edifying of scripts. In the movie of his days, the production values were always low, the direction forever shapeless, the cast incessantly drifting off the set. Those rare moments of dramatic resolution came either prematurely or too late; and meanwhile the middle act, where all the narrative decisions hung precariously suspended, the middle act seemed to stretch on forever.

  It was his own fault, of course, this mess and disorder: the price one paid for postponing the future too long. He’d been out of college for a decade now. So why was he still fucking around purposelessly like some outtake from The Graduate? And why drag Gail Hastings into it? To require her to inhabit Anne Bancroft’s black fishnets was unfair to Gail, who for one thing did not even wear stockings, or skirts either, but preferred billowy black pants and nubby, rust-colored sweaters made of natural fibers. No, Gail was in no sense the seductress in this little flirtation of theirs, if you could even call it that, if anyone could be said to be seducing anyone else in a relationship that consisted of such depraved adventures as visiting a stroke victim in rehab, swimming laps in the Y’s overheated pool, then occasionally going out for a cup of coffee afterward. Decaffeinated coffee no less.

  “One of these nights,” he mused, “we should think about getting a room.”

  “We have a room.” She gestured around them, at the blank walls of the rehab unit. “This is our room.”

  “It’s not ours. It belongs to him.”

  “It’s ours if we’re here long enough. Squatters’ rights. I used to do my share of housing law, back in my idealistic youth.”

  “That’s not the him I meant though,” he said.

  “I know what you meant. I know.”

  The second time they’d met had been the week before Thanksgiving—a month after Don Blackburn’s stroke, and, possibly more to the point, four months since Gail’s husband had somehow got himself incarcerated in the county jail. Now the leaves were down but the snow wasn’t; the bleakness of the landscape lay fully exposed, bared and shivering as if from a virulent flu. Cornstalks hung broken in the fields. The sky was a civil war of blues and grays, ringed by tattered violet clouds that rose puffily from the hills like the discharge of cannons. When had the geese all fled? When had the grass stopped growing and started dying? Oren had lost track of the seasonal calendar, the little white squares that framed the days, the tidy processional rows that marched off the weeks, the big picture at the top that lent each month its own unique coloration. Without it he felt dazed, unaligned: the survivor of a battle he hadn’t even known was taking place.

  In the supermarket the shelves were ravaged. The canned pumpkin was gone, the cranberries depleted, the pyramids of clementines in ruins. The last unthawed turkeys, blockish and upended, lay strewn around the meat freezer, latticed in yellow string. Marked down. Not that Oren cared. He had no plans for the holiday—he’d only half-realized it was coming—and his habits of consumption tended toward the ascetic anyway. He was a bachelor; he was used to carrying meals home in one hand. When he went to the market, he would glance in other people’s carts, noting with satisfaction all the bulky processed foods he himself had passed on and feeling, in the uncluttered velocity of his own cart as it zoomed over the polished floor, a testament to his best qualities, his leanness and stoicism, his great gift for doing without. Or was it his great curse? He could not make up his mind. He was a master of deferral, all right, an artist of abstention with a thirty-inch waist. But today he was hungry, and tired, and dreading the long holiday to come; today, the fact that he could see right through his few well-considered purchases to the bare metal grid at the bottom of his cart made him more aware than he liked of the holes that had opened up—or rather never been closed—between himself and his fellow beings. He had deferred too much, he thought, too much and too well. So he decided to get a turkey after all.

  The one he chose for himself was a monster—the fattest, lumpiest, most steroidally freakish of the entire flock. He laid the bird gently in his cart like a prize. Then, because it looked a bit lonely down there amid the three little tubs of low-fat yogurt, and the tiny loaf of twelve-grain bread, and the small recyclable bag of organic produce, he began to throw in a lot of other stuff too, as he worked his way down the aisle, sweet potatoes and frozen green beans and canned pineapples and cranberry sauce and pale chemically enhanced coconut slivers, along with a liter of Australian Shiraz to wash it all down, along with yet another bottle of Maker’s Mark to wash that down. Then he wheeled his cart proudly to the checkout, where he made his final impulse purchase of the day: one of those glossy food magazines they place in the racks by the registers as you line up with the other late shoppers, waiting to be scanned and released.

  Paper or plastic, came the cashier’s little song. It was a weekly test Oren always seemed to fail. “I don’t care,” he said.

  “You have to choose.” The cashier was not pa
id her lousy minimum wage to go around deciding what materials other people’s grocery bags should be made of. “It’s up to you.”

  “Honest, it doesn’t matter in the slightest.”

  He detected from her voice, however, as she swooshed his purchases across the scanner, a clear preference in the matter, so he went ahead and chose the bag the store, or at least the cashier, seemed to want him to choose, and as usual that choice—plastic—proved the wrong one. When he lifted it from his cart, it ripped neatly and noiselessly down the middle; the big bird thunked onto the car seat and came to rest on the floor.

  He’d chosen plastic the last time, Oren remembered too.

  At home, he extracted from the closet his largest cooking vessel (that is, Sabine’s largest cooking vessel, for she had left the bulk of her kitchen equipment, as she’d left so much else necessary for sustenance, behind) and as the magazine instructed, plunged the turkey breast-down in brine. The stuffing promised to be complicated so he got to work on that next. Never mind that he didn’t like stuffing, any more than he liked pancakes and waffles; he’d been seized by a vision, back in the market, of a big, joyous, carb-loaded holiday meal, and stuffing was essential to this vision; without stuffing this meal of his would rest on a hollow foundation, as hollow as the cavity that yawned, loveless and dark, between the bird’s thighs. So he rolled up his sleeves and set to work.

  Clearly this was how you got through holidays like Thanksgiving, Oren thought, as a mature single person with no girlfriend: by solving arcane, demanding, self-created problems of no real significance. How you got through a life. And that was cool. That was fine. Because self-reliance was a time-honored New England trait, and for better or, okay, maybe for worse, he was a New Englander now, a can-do, hardscrabble Yankee, a rugged individualist who did not waffle over grocery bags or sit around whining about the difficulty of spending major holidays alone, but actually did something about it—like cooking his own huge, expensive, ridiculously labor-intensive meal.

  The only problem was fitting the ingredients for this great feast into his dwarfish and unaccommodating refrigerator. Even after he’d covered the turkey in foil and jammed it onto the bottom shelf, the bird continued to offer resistance, as if some residual evasive instinct still lingered in its bones. Its legs jutted against the bars of the shelf above; its pimpled wings, bleeding at the joints, poked through the foil like an admonishment. But of whom? Not of him, Oren thought, but of the great fallen creature itself, its white, denuded obesity, its useless dreams of flight. Because in the end, what were wings for if not for flight?

  It seemed an important question, one that reverberated at odd moments through the chambers of his head. And there were many such moments. Indeed, when it came to the design, production, and distribution of odd moments, no source was quite so hummingly efficient, in Oren’s experience, as the middle school in which he worked and, it often seemed, lived, or failed to, Mondays through Fridays, seven thirty to four.

  “‘He had contrived, or rather he had happened, to dissever himself from the world…to give up his place and privileges with living men, without being admitted among the dead…’” Looking up from the assigned text, the afternoon before his little shopping spree, Oren had confronted the students with his most receptive and unthreatening expression. “Who wants to tell us what dissever means?”

  Hopelessly he waited to be delivered from the ensuing silence. But no deliverance was forthcoming. With Don Blackburn laid up in rehab indefinitely, and half a dozen teachers under the weather—and there was a lot of weather, God knew, to be under—and also, as Zoe pointedly reminded him, no Social Studies class of his own to teach after lunch, Oren had been the logical if not only choice to take over Don’s eighth-period Language Arts class. And so he’d bowed to necessity once again. Already he’d bluffed his way through the proper use of quotation marks and some rudimentary state-mandated vocabulary lessons. Now they were into a new, more substantial and troublesome unit on Classic American Authors.

  That week they were discussing a story by Hawthorne, a writer Oren did not much care for and had read exactly zero books by since his freshman survey course in college. Fortunately most of the kids in eighth-period Language Arts hadn’t read him either, or even, from their lofty, shellacked expressions, been seriously tempted. This appeared to be standard practice in Room 101N for dealing with such pedestrian matters as homework. Oren didn’t blame them. For weeks, through no fault of their own, they’d been hostages to their teacher’s illness, left to drift unmoored as a procession of surrogates sailed across the front of the room, slowing down but never stopping, never landing…now their loyalties had closed like a gate. Reading Hawthorne wasn’t proving to be much help either, any more than Emerson and Thoreau the week before. Reading about transcendence didn’t do it for these kids. They had, it seemed, transcended reading about transcendence. He didn’t blame them for that either.

  Still, he did blame them for some things—the unattractive, hectoring tone in his voice as he posed them questions, the tumid half-moons under his armpits as he waited for their answers, the odd quaalude-ish slowness of the clock overhead, its hands drooping listlessly at its sides, unable or unwilling to advance. Even under ideal circumstances the class would have been a trial. Right away he’d counted three basketball jocks, two clowns, four bright but docile underachievers, and three totally flatlined morons, and that was just among the boys. The girls and their subterranean sympathies were anybody’s guess. They stared up at him now with a serene and pallid blankness. He might have been a crossword puzzle in a magazine to which none of their parents subscribed.

  “Can someone just remind us what’s happening in this story? So we’re all on the same page, as it were?”

  No one smiled at his lame little pun. Why should they? Still, it would have made for a nice change.

  “Anyone at all?”

  More silence. For lack of anything else to do, he squinted out the window, at a sky shorn of color and sunlight and all memory of birds. Where had they gone? He’d never given much thought to where birds went when they weren’t flying. Probably very dull, conventional places where nothing was happening. But even birds couldn’t fly around 24/7—they had to come down sometime. Even if that coming down felt more like a falling. A capitulation…

  “Ooh. Ooh.”

  The trick, he supposed, if one was a bird, was to make oneself at home in both venues, in flight and at rest. That way you didn’t miss the sky so much when you weren’t in it. Didn’t waste a lot of time staring out the window, wondering where to fly next…

  “Ooh. Ooh. Ooh.”

  Funny, though, how the longer he stood there doing just that, the more the sky, like a bashful student under pressure of scrutiny, seemed to blur and recede, while his own face, flattened and pale, a bit googly around the eyes, superimposed itself over the glass like a palimpsest. And so we imprint ourselves upon their minds, Oren thought. Stubbornly. Provisionally. Ephemerally. And around that ephemera, the grid of student faces, five rows wide and five rows deep, like a net he’d fallen into, or that had fallen over him…

  “Ooh. Oooh. Ooh.”

  He turned from the window and regarded them, his wards, his charges. The best if not only evidence of ongoing mental activity was the salty musk they gave off, like trapped fog, and the way their eyes, slitty and vacant, blinked away at intervals like cursors on a screen. This stultifying boredom, this waiting without knowing what it was they waited for, without knowing that they were waiting—was it infectious? Was this the very virus, the flaw in the software, that caused Don Blackburn’s mainframe to crash? That wiped the drives clean, rendered the chat rooms inoperative? Already he could feel his own operating system, that patchwork assembly, begin to flicker and squawk…

  “Ooh. Ooh. Ooh.”

  Jenny Saunders—a major suck-up whose father taught political science at the college, and whose mother had homeschooled her through fifth grade, and whose desk, alas, sat right in front of his
, in the unavoidable center of the front row—was issuing the breathless marsupial gasps she always made when she raised her hand. For a change he was grateful to hear them.

  “Jenny?”

  “Okay, so, there’s this guy, Wakefield—”

  “Dude,” Tucker Byrnes called out, “my uncle lives in Wakefield.”

  “That’s Waitsfield, dumbass,” said Taylor—or was it Tyler?—Cook.

  “Ahem,” Jenny said, her cheeks mottling and measling from this commotion she’d given rise to, “so there’s this guy, Wakefield, and one day he like takes off on his family for no reason at all and moves into this house down the street, though where he gets the money for two houses nobody even talks about, and he sort of stalks his family in this really creepy way because he’s got no job and nothing else to do, and he doesn’t have to pay child support because they all think he’s dead. And then one day, it’s like twenty years later? It’s pouring down rain and really really cold, and all of a sudden, and this is kind of random too in my opinion, and I showed it to my mom by the way and she agrees? He just shows up at his old house out of the blue, like nothing ever happened. And just when you’d think his wife’s going to finally really ream him out good, which he totally deserves in my opinion, the whole thing just stops for no reason. The end.”

  “Thank you, Jenny. Good summary. So what do you make of it?”

  “Me?”

  “You. Or anyone. But sure, you.”

  “Well, to me,” Jenny said, “honestly, it makes no sense. Why would someone go to all that trouble just to move down the street from his own house, when he’s got this really nice family that totally appreciates him? It’s unrealistic.”

  “It’s not supposed to be realistic,” Tyler/Taylor explained pedantically. “It’s a book.”