All the Beautiful People We Once Knew

by Edward Carlson

  He possessed a convincing answer for every twist and turn involving the ethics of the profession.

  “He’s a good man,” Hemmings said, raising a small glass of beer to me. The award now like another person between us perched atop its own barstool, caped with the red silk sash.

  “He’s a great man,” Fleeger corrected him. “He just doesn’t know it.”

  “You’re in a sweet spot right now,” Hemmings said, pointing at me. “What are you, thirty-five? This is the age, man. You’re not a kid anymore but you’re not old either. All you have to do is start realizing you’re an adult.”

  He was drunk and on a roll.

  “Now what you don’t want to do is follow where Fleeger here is heading with all this Internet dating. At some point he’s going to contract a venereal disease and then he’s going to want to get married and have kids but at that point he’ll be the forty-five-year-old guy with the twenty-five-year-old wife and a dormant case of warts and you don’t want that either. Because then none of your friends’ wives will talk to her at the cocktail parties. Not because of the warts but because of the age difference. So she’ll be standing there by herself all night staring at the floor while you’re trying to talk with your buddies and where is the fun in that? Huh? But then you also don’t want to be the fifty-five-year-old guy with the fifty-five-year-old wife either because by then you’ll be relying too much on lithium ion batteries and pharmaceuticals and where is the fun in that? Huh? You’ll be lying in bed with your old wife on top of you and a remote control vibrating dildo up her ass and you hitting the pulse button and the next thing you know the batteries go cold and well there’s no fun in that either. Huh? Fleeger’s in the same boat as you. Except he doesn’t have your problem.”

  “Which is what?” I asked.

  “Your problem is that you think too much.”

  “Bingo,” Fleeger said.

  “You can’t be a great lawyer if you think too much all the time,” Hemmings continued. “You’ll fry the hardware.”

  He tapped his skull with his finger as Tucker leaned against the baby grand piano and wrapped an arm around Attika’s waist.

  “Can you handle all this attention?” Celeste asked me, swinging around my starboard bow.

  “I’m working on it.”

  “So what was all that about with Jim?”

  I followed Fleeger’s advice and buried any thought of actual repercussions.

  “He’s pissed off we won’t settle.”

  “Of course he is. That’s the point. Tell him to make a reasonable settlement demand and we’ll entertain it. But there is no way Major Thomas is getting anywhere near what he’s demanding.”

  “He wants two-fifty.”

  “He’s a fool.”

  I looked in my drink and she swung to my opposite side. It would be fatal for me to tell her I needed this case to settle. That I needed it off my back. That it was becoming a drag.

  “We’ll discuss it more after I receive your full report. Because I don’t want to talk about work now. I’m drunk. And I hate talking about work when I’m drunk because I don’t have full control. So instead I want to talk about you. Most men in your position, Mr. Harker, would be thrilled to find themselves in my good graces, because I could easily send you enough cases to move you through the ranks into partnership.”

  “I know.”

  “Really? Then be honest with me, Stephen. Are you having second thoughts about your choice of profession? If so I want to know before I invest any more time in our relationship. Is this not for you?”

  “It’s not for anybody,” I replied, reckless.

  “I disagree. Clearly it’s for Robert. I’m not sure he would choose to do anything different. But you?”

  “But me what?”

  “Don’t get so defensive. My God, it gives you away.”

  I ordered a beer from the bartender and he wrapped the bottle with a red paper ascot. Nelson’s hands continued to rub Attika’s lower back. She didn’t order him to stop.

  “Don’t try to substitute disdain for dissatisfaction, Stephen. It can’t hold forever. And nothing good ever comes from it.”

  I shut my mouth. Tucker belted a round of lyrics, breaking the grip of Celeste’s attention.

  “Oh dear,” Celeste said.

  “He means well.”

  “That’s worth something, right?” she said.

  “Most certainly is.”

  I had to go, couldn’t lock on anymore. My conviction held fast. I said my goodbyes and kissed Celeste on both cheeks. Fleeger picked me up, set me down, and they let me leave with minimal protest but collectively disappointed I insisted on doing so. I looked back at the bar. Fleeger and Hemmings hunched over and conspiring. Tucker and Celeste scrolling their phones. Attika, eyes moist with drink, waved goodbye.

  The subway buckled and bumped and deposited me at Canal Street. I avoided the groping palm of a shirtless man doubled over in pain, smeared with carbon, shaking a cell phone vajazzled with the rhinestones of the Puerto Rican flag. Unsure which way to walk, I texted Kath. Asked if I could come over. My phone vibrated a series of messages released from some digital holding pen. Stephen where are you? Stephen come over. Stephen come find me I’m out with friends. Stephen now is too late. Stephen I made us lunch reservations later this week at Shoemacher’s. It’s close to your office. Your treat.

  I didn’t reply. Because I wanted Kath to be disappointed as well. Because I wanted her to await my reply. To have to wait for me too. I admonished myself for being annoyed and disappointed. The neon light above the noodle shop sizzled red and gold sequins. I turned the doorknob and entered my apartment.

  “Stephen?” Gregg said. He and a guest sat perched on a bench in the courtyard below, before a fire burning inside a terracotta saucer, both holding French horns that glowed with the reflection of the significant flames. “Are you home?”

  I opened the window.

  “Want to join us?”

  “Thanks man, but I’m beat.”

  “OK.”

  I switched off the lights and rolled an all-natural cigarette and looked around the apartment. I felt supersaturated. At the point of dissolving into a cloudy mass of swirling broken particles. In the great white light of the open refrigerator I poured myself a long vodka and sat by the window. Kath’s avocado pit had sprouted one tender root, stretching microscopic increments with each passing moment as Gregg and his guest commenced tuning their horns.

  16

  WITH HASTE, I REACHED for the phone in the dark, vibrating across the coffee table. Caller Unknown.

  “Hello.”

  The digital disintegration of a human voice, as if trapped between the satellites and telephony, likely corrupted by another cloudburst of solar radiation. I told myself it must be Kath, the call blocked by celestial forces. I hung up the phone. Caller Unknown vibrated the phone again, now in my hand. The voice on the other end yelled in a language I couldn’t comprehend, crackled and distant. As if calling from another country. I hung up. It vibrated again. Caller Unknown was trying to get through to me. I let it vibrate.

  “This is Stephen,” I said, as if answering my office phone. The line now clear but Caller Unknown remained silent. “This is Stephen. Who is this?” A few seconds passed and they hung up. I sat there staring at the phone. Hating the device for its constant presence, my incessant accessibility, its constant impact. I convinced myself that after breaking through the digital obstructions Caller Unknown finally realized they had the wrong number. It vibrated yet again. Caller Unknown. That was enough. I refused to answer and the vibrating ceased.

  I closed my eyes and struggled to fall back asleep. Stimulated by the phone’s blue light and the paranoia induced by the multiple calls, I lay on the couch, fighting myself, menaced and agitated by Caller Unknown. I didn’t want to be inside, couldn’t continue fighting against the couch and the pillow. It was only eleven. I dressed and exited the apartment building and walked outside into a cold, hard r
ain, its individual drops striking the earth like jacks. Through a kaleidoscope of yellow and white and green and red lights, above, speeding past, suspended over intersections, aglow in tavern and restaurant windows, I walked toward the Village, smoking a soggy, hand-rolled cigarette, in search of a bar where I could regain myself.

  A black man shuffled toward me, sheltered against the rain inside a long, tan raglan, wheeling behind him a torn carry-on suitcase. A thick keloid scar bulged the length of his left cheek and his hands were splotchy and pink with vitiligo. His upright thumb communicated that he needed a light and asked if I had one. My disposable Bic failed to ignite the soggy butt of his half-smoked Newport.

  “Hold on,” I said.

  He followed me and we stood beneath the awning of an East Village junk store, across the street from a papal bust weeping in the rain, a Bud Light tallboy impaled on the Polish church’s wrought-iron fence. I removed my tobacco pouch and rolled him a straight, dry cigarette. My hands clear and steady in the warmthless neon lights glowing in the junk store’s window.

  The man cupped his pink and black hands around the blue-orange flame I maintained with my thumb. We held it together, protected from the elements. If I was an artist this is the energy I would strive to capture on canvas or film. This reflection of light we held, our flesh glowing incandescent with light and water and red blood cells. Hunched over the flame, I could see the thick roll of the haphazardly stitched scar running the length of his mandible, tiny dots where doctors had sewn him shut with gaping sutures. One strong punch would knock free a piece of his face.

  “Thank you, my man,” he said.

  I liked doing this. I needed the conversation.

  “You have someplace to go?”

  “What kind of question is that?” he snapped, but he wasn’t angry. “You think I’m homeless? Wandering around in the rain? And if I am, what are you going to do about it? Offer me your couch? Serve me a hot, home-cooked meal?”

  He paused and we smoked.

  “Probably not,” I replied.

  “Probably not. But that’s not the question you should be asking right now. The question you need to ask yourself is, do you have someplace to go?”

  “I’m working on it.”

  “Well, you better figure it out soon.”

  I asked why.

  “Because by my calculations there’s just a few more weeks before that sun disgorges a billion-ton glob of plasma straight toward planet Earth that wipes out the North American power grid with a runaway, hemispheric electric current.”

  “You think so?”

  “I know so. Those black dots on the sun are in flux, expanding and moving, going berserk. I’ve been watching and measuring them. And when they merge, you better have someplace to go.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  “Do or don’t, but it’d be better for you if you did.”

  I felt damp and chilled, craved warmth and a drink, would worry about the sun over beer. We finished smoking and flicked the butts into the rushing gutter, where they coursed toward a storm drain, like miniature whitewater rafts, en route to the East River and out to sea.

  He thanked me again for the cigarette and walked east on the narrowing numbered street, trawling his tattered suitcase. Beneath the shaking trees, he disappeared in the rising squall of the late-winter storm.

  I walked in squares. East on Fourth. North on Second. South on First. Thinking about the man and his busted face and his fading hands. About what he said about the sun and his brutal scar and whether the scar augmented or diminished the veracity of the warning. It did the former. But whereas tragedy worked against Thomas, there was credibility in this man’s conviction, despite how farfetched. Perhaps because he attached no blame and claimed no entitlement. Perhaps because he was black I believed him more, loathed him less. If so, then so be it.

  Now past the white-tiled Halal chicken restaurants and the mosque beseeching respect for all God’s prophets, outside of which Arab men in denim jackets argued in Arabic over a compact disc. I entered a bar decorated like a souk and ordered an Efes. Radio Istanbul in the exposed-brick corner strumming an oud and slapping a drum and smoking grass and drinking beer. Someone winked, face hidden by the fug, and toasted the crowd. We raised our drinks and I downed another Efes.

  I departed in search of another bar, for something I knew I wouldn’t find. The new bartender excited about the craft selections she had on tap. NYU kids blowing spent cocaine into mangled Kleenex and arguing about baseball and declaiming that the New York teams don’t have a chance, man. Because no one wants to play baseball in the snow and rain, man. Because baseball is as much about rhythm and chemistry as individual talent as well as the weather, man.

  “But it’s the Latins. You can’t deny the Latins are the best ballplayers in the world. And they just refuse to play here.”

  I couldn’t comprehend what they were talking about.

  “Latins. Man,” another kid said. “They fucking hate the cold.”

  The girl sitting next to me wore a Seahawks jersey. I inquired whether she was a Seahawks fan.

  “You staring at my tits?” she asked and walked away laughing.

  I exited and wandered, entered, drank and exited, the bartenders blending into one common denominator of mistaken tattoos and gaping ear lobes. I spent money on drinks as if both were sworn enemies. Hipster kids at the bar, dispensing hipster wisdom to justify their viewpoint that Donald Trump was all right. Explaining the difference between a five-pane and a six-pane baseball hat. That intelligence was the new rock and roll. That intellect jacked up prices of obscure pharmaceutical drugs. “Ain’t nobody bringing new drugs to deez streets widout ya boy getting a taste.” Now drunk, I read a Reuters article about drug-makers’ patchy investment in tropical disease vaccines due to uncertain commercial prospects. Fantasized about Zika breaking out across the South. Whole colonies of microcephalic children abandoned and left to fend for themselves in the Everglades. Reverting to primitive life. Waging war on the bigheads with clubs and poleaxes pillaged from rednecks’ living rooms and tossing bigheads’ remains into the swamplands. To appease the angry gator god.

  As I scrolled the news on my phone a woman endeavored to make a new connection with me. She adjusted her bra in the mirror above the bar. If Magritte lived here in this time he wouldn’t paint apples and men wearing bowlers falling from the sky. He would paint multiethnic cocks with puffy white wings, flying like geese, forming a V, in search of willing cunts … with Groucho Marx eyebrows cracking open décolletage in the angled mirrors above the liquor bottles illuminated by rows of votive candles.

  “That looks interesting,” she said, nodding at the article on my screen.

  She was pink and broad-nosed with frizzy brown hair, racially unidentifiable.

  “I find the whole situation with what’s going on in the Middle East these days fascinating,” she said. “My family has always been into war. I had a grandfather who fought against the English brigades at Aleppo. He taught me everything I know.”

  With one eye, I peered into the bottom of my pint glass as a man grabbed her almost by the back of her neck. His designer T-shirt adorned with crumbling skulls and shattered mandibles. The distinct, combative, upright gait of the tattooed and gel-spiked white man uncomfortable in his surroundings. I wanted to comment on that fine-looking razorblade dog tag hanging around his neck but didn’t. He was already enraged, and I was in no state to take or throw a punch.

  “No, Bob,” she told him. “I am staying right where I am. Talking with?”

  “Jackson,” I said.

  “Very nice.”

  Bob walked away.

  “Can you believe how rude that bloke was?” she asked, reclaiming her seat, pretending she didn’t know him.

  “Not at all.”

  I slipped into the doldrums of drink. Ignored the woman still talking as I paid my tab and finished my beer, freed myself from another encounter, exited the bar, and walked east through
the New York projects. Past cars propped on milkcrates and up the red-gated spine of the Williamsburg Bridge, where I peered down at the fires and tents and cardboard bedding of the protestors’ camp. Alone, I reached the bridge’s apogee, prayed a meteor would strike Brooklyn, turned around, vertigo rising, like walking across the roof of a steel cathedral. It’s the imagination that gets you.

  Now north along the East River, across a patchwork of halogen lights and freezing puddles. I reached the end of an abandoned pier fashioned from springy greenheart planks and stood before a row of silent, bulbous capstans, half expecting them to turn and greet me with cartoon faces. The river smelled of tar and motor lubricant. A small bulk carrier approached the long expanse of an open Brooklyn berth. Now came her wash, rippling against the hourglass pilings. I walked home beneath the Big Dipper, spinning above New York City like the errant hand of some malfunctioning galaxy clock.

  The cold wind resumed and my legs stiffened. I hailed a taxi, rested my head against the frigid window, paid the fare, and exited the car a few blocks from home to avoid paying for wending through one-way streets.

  “Go with God, young man,” the driver said.

  Night had passed into the purple-blue sky that appears just before dawn. The hour of the crows, now amassed in the wet trees and circling overhead. A penumbra standing two floors above the street watched me pass, pivoting on its spot. I stared back. It pulled curtains closed. The moment before you think something momentous will happen but it doesn’t. I reminded myself it was a ruse. That I was no Nostradamus.

  I turned onto my street. Failing to discern the threat because I wasn’t paying attention. GOTTA GO. Too wrapped in thought to react as Thomas’s burnt sienna GMC Avalanche sped at me, lights off, dumping fuel into the roaring valves of pistons and chambers of steel. GOTTA GO. The vehicle swerved, all wheels pulling my direction as I quickened to the curve, where I tripped and twisted over knotty tree roots that buckled beneath the sidewalk and landed on outstretched palms, now indented with minute pain inflicted by pebbles and glass. The vehicle slowed for a moment, that moment in slow motion, as Thomas turned to face me, the breathing mask covering his face, tiny filters pulsing, before the motor revved and the Avalanche churned around the street corner. Red testicles swinging from beneath his angry, patriotic bumper.