I struggled to solidify my guts. Commanded myself to solidify. My brain and body were sheared. I couldn’t remember the last time I fell. Didn’t remember the ground being this hard. My hands shook. The key refused to enter the lock. The substance in my veins and muscles turned to putty. I shouldered open the front door shaking and breathing. Fumbling with the apartment key. Tiny glass fibers of the shattered phone inside my pocket, inside my skin, between my fingers. I entered the apartment and ran to the bathroom.
17
I RUBBED MY PALMS through the remains of my hair, rolled and smoked a cigarette, rolled and smoked another. Sat on the couch, stood, paced, searched the apartment for Thomas despite knowing he couldn’t be there, under the couch pillows, behind the shower curtain, inside the closet. I looked out the window, expecting to discover Thomas had gone infrared, squatting inside Gregg’s copse of plastic trees, calling in the coordinates for the drone strike.
The radiators banged and hissed, smelling of steel and steam. I couldn’t take the noise. The pressure increased and the radiator spit foul boiling water. I found the radiator key in a cluttered drawer next to the Leatherman. I slid the Leatherman in my pocket, for offense or defense, I wasn’t sure which, my only weapon a tool, and tightened the radiator valve with the key. The hissing ceased. I looked out the window again. Checked the flat roofs and fire escapes above the courtyard for Thomas the sniper. Thomas the Avenger. I looked at my watch. There was no one to call. Composure solidified around the edges. My fear began to clot. It was almost dawn.
Again I checked the window. Enough time passed and again I checked it. I stood. Opened the fridge. Grabbed a beer. Tossed the cap in the sink. Raised the bottle to my mouth and set it down empty. I laced on my boots and exited the apartment.
The rental car bounced atop the New Jersey Turnpike, as if there was extra air in its tires. The highway beneath me howled in slices. Military flags hanging from the overpasses, fastened to the protective cyclone fencing. I drove faster, straddling the yellow dash lines, pushing the car’s limits, the RPM pin into the red zone, draining the fuel tank. The steering wheel shook. The roar of American trucks, sounding capable of space travel, but just for a second, as I passed their spinning tires and spiked hubcaps. Cars cleared my path, their drivers assuming I was a state trooper behind the wheel of a speeding American sedan.
I raced a landing plane, myself and the pilot, both of us operating comets. The sound of our engines throttling forward and backward as the plane descended from the sky, his pistons reversed but mine still churning. The phone vibrated atop the dashboard, its touchscreen shattered into shards and splinters, cobwebs of busted glass. A new message from Fleeger, on a Saturday morning, because we needed to talk about my billable hours. Again and soon. I tossed the shattered phone to the back seat and rolled down the window and breathed in cold benzene and ether. Again through the skyline of smokestacks, miniature city of energy, cracking open carbon compounds. Now parallel to a silver westbound train. Through the woods of central New Jersey. Union excavations. Business parks. Wetlands. Beached ferries in the marshes. Silver trucks bulging with tanks and spigots. Up and over the Oz-like bridges and deep into the granite hills of Pennsylvania as the sun rose higher in the rearview mirror.
Whipsawed, I exited the interstate. Past the strip malls and the Pentecostal churches and the flapping bendy car showroom Gumbies and into the open fields of winter wheat. The snow thinner now and the thaw almost upon us and the trip shorter than last time. I drove past Thomas’s split-level house and deer stand buttonwood and pressed the brake. A yellow Gadsden flag now flew from the house’s front porch. DON’T TREAD ON ME. The eastern rattler. I parked the car down Mill House Road and my broken phone vibrated again in the back seat. More messages from Fleeger. Saying we needed to talk ASAP. What did you tell Lazlis? Celeste concerned your heart is not in it? What did you tell her? I sat in the front seat and sipped cold coffee. Listened to the engine cool, the upholstery settle, my stomach churn. I rolled and smoked a cigarette, tapping random words against the backs of my two front teeth.
I walked up the driveway, crouched behind the Avalanche, approached the two-car garage, stood on my toes, and peered through the garage door windows. Something massive hung from the ceiling, my eyes adjusted to the darkness, a full-sized deer, gutted and skinned down to suet and bone and spinning in small quarter turns by a thick chain bolted through its small mouth. A murder of crows alighted from the woods in unison and circled above the house.
The soft, soggy ground soaked the hem of my pants as I entered the woods that surrounded Thomas’s house. A small, steep ridge collapsed into a clear, turbid creek that coursed beneath melting, bubbled ice. I walked atop the flat, slippery rocks. Stepping from one to another to another, teetering but not falling. I hoisted myself up the bank by the crooked trunk of a fallen dogwood and approached the small encampment and hillock of dirt filmed by Honda.
Thomas had since half-cyclone-fenced the encampment, a warren of huts and passageways constructed with two-by-fours and plywood and polypropylene tarps. Thick electrical wires linked the encampment to the transformers. The single-prop airplane that before lay in pieces had been cleaned of moss and partially reassembled, its engine hauled from the fuselage and hanging from a hoist sheltered beneath a tarp, undergoing repair via the tools and parts stored in the shipping container, whose doors were now propped open, a single lightbulb hanging above the interior workbench. I listened before I moved. Only the looping crows.
My thoughts moved faster and I reappeared to myself. Neon-orange NO TRESPASSING signs now tacked to the trunk of every tree. I circled the pile of dirt, maintaining a long radius, then I ascended the ridge and peered inside. Thomas’s gut pile. Mounds of offal and intestines and meat-stripped deer carcasses caked with lye, grimacing at death, and swarming with the buzz of black, green-headed flies summoned to the stench. Of bucks and does, even a few fawns, butchered for their tender meat. I felt nothing. Thought of only what this meant for the case while circling the gut pile and photographing the dead deer with my cracked phone from multiple angles.
The questions formed themselves. Explain for us, Major, how you can claim total and complete physical disability due to multiple orthopedic injuries on account of your employment with FreedomQuest when you also regularly hunt ample-sized deer. That you then dispose of in the gut pile behind your house, after butchering the animals hung from a chain bolted to the ceiling of your garage. Doesn’t sound like something a man with your extensive disabilities should be capable of doing, does it? Just off the top of your head, how many deer do you think that is? I count about twenty. You? And how about that airplane engine? How many pounds does that weigh? Did you hoist that by yourself from the fuselage? And, by the way, do you have a license to hunt that many deer? Out of season? I didn’t think so. Because a license to hunt this many deer out of season doesn’t exist.
Someone moved through the woods, lumbering like bigfoot in Mossy Oak 3D camouflage, clearing a path before him through the bare vines and bramble. Almost hidden against the pattern of the leafless woods but for his movements. It was Thomas. It looked like Thomas. There was no debate. There was no thought. Gotta go. I sledded down the embankment on the side of my leg, still bruised from last night’s fall. Over rocks and sticks. Splashing now through the creek, mud sealing each footfall, stumbling forward. I reached the edge of the woods and crossed into the open lawn and sprinted toward the road. Past the side of the house and now past the garage. I hurried alongside the Avalanche, crouched behind the rear bumper, removed the Leatherman from my back pocket, snipped the Avalanche of its red bull balls, heavy and round. They weren’t plastic. They were rubber. I chucked them as high and deep into the woods as I could muster. The American art of long distance throwing. Gotta Go! They landed without a sound. I located the fob in my pocket and unlocked the car door and started the ignition.
18
MONDAY MORNING. THE BUILDING’S hand scanner denied me access to the elevato
r bank. I bumped against the turnstile, bumped again, bumped once more. It wouldn’t budge. I assumed Kilgore had finally fired me. The ex-cop security guard swiped me in, nodded, walked away. I was wrong.
Money Man again on the tiny elevator television, now sharing his entrepreneurial recipe, his foolproof method to make a fortune. “Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell and advertise.” He grabbed the television camera and zoomed it on his face. “If you want to walk like a duck and talk like a duck then be a duck.” He’s going to bite the camera, I thought. But instead he advised that it’s never a bad time to invest in petrochemicals.
I sat down behind my desk and attempted to work. Money Man would fire me. I would fire myself. My interest in billing law had reached a new low. I played Jenga with the Department of Labor regulations governing WorldScore’s obligation to pay Thomas compensation pending resolution of the underlying dispute. IIs and As and iiis. The pieces fell. The tower tumbled. I billed two and three-tenths hours for researching a question I couldn’t answer. My inbox pinged with a fresh email from Fleeger’s secretary warning about the inherent risk of leaving your GPS in the car.
“Not only gives robbers a map to your home. The very fact you are where you are means you are not there. Think about it.”
“What if more than one person lives at home?” I replied.
No response.
Here it was now.
“Good point.”
“Come see me now,” Fleeger emailed.
I entered Fleeger’s office. He sat behind his desk, hunched behind his flat screens. He was dressed like a candyman. Fruit Stripe shirt. Candy Dot tie. Violet suit. Probably matching Fruit Stripe or Candy Dot socks. His rainbow of fruit flavors spreadsheet of women displayed in the glass window behind him.
“I’m Robert Fleeger,” he explained into the speakerphone. “No. I’m Robert Fleeger.”
The female robotic voice asked him to please repeat his name.
“Rob. Ert. Fleeg. Er.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t understand that.”
He ended the call with a fuck.
“You’re late,” he said, maneuvering his mouse between the flat screens. Snipping data from one woman and pasting it to another. He didn’t look at me. He watched me from the narrowing space between his hairline and his eyebrows. As he aged his hairline advanced rather than receded. I wanted to ask him what shampoo he used. I told him I had a stomach thing. He asked if I was OK. He sounded sincere. I told him yes. He leaned back in his chair and flipped open a stapled invoice dashed and crossed with red ink, pressed the soles of his burgundy strapped loafers against his battered desk, and looked up at the popcorn ceiling tile. He was in a good mood. Or rather, he wasn’t in a bad mood.
“Did you really spend only three hours studying product liability cases when researching the summary judgment motion in Wuxi?”
“Is that what the bill says?”
“It does.”
“Then it must be true.”
He looked at me. There was no miasma like before. He was all detail, high definition. The plate tectonics of his face had ruptured a nose between the broad plains of his cheeks. Stains beneath his eyes from lack of sleep, where a skin tag had begun to sprout. Ears slightly asymmetrical. Strands of dark black hair—thicker than the hair on his head—sprouted from the ridgelines of his ears, which glimmered in the bright morning sunlight entering is corner office windows.
“I think I know what the problem is. You’re underbilling.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Maybe not but I know so. We cited like fifty cases in the motion for summary judgment. And yet you only spent three hours reading them? Impossible. And even if not impossible then we’re going to add to it. Because it warrants more.”
He placed his feet on the floor and leaned back in his seat.
“This is something else we’re going to work on. Your time notes need to possess an air of billability.” He said billability like he was conducting Mozart with his hands. “Billing is like making hamburgers. You need to add a little fat in there to make it sizzle. And we need to start making your time sizzle. Because in addition to Whitey now I got the accounting department on my ass about you. You’re almost at the point of starting to cost the firm money.”
“Can you handle it?”
“Of course I can handle it. But what will I get from you in return?”
“My undying commitment.”
“Is that a promise?”
I saluted him. He saluted back.
“Lazlis has been on me and Celeste all weekend threatening sanctions for harassing his client. Me and Celeste decided that we’re going to throw him a bone and approve paying for Thomas’s bladder surgery to get Lazlis off our back a bit.”
“Since when did his bladder become an issue?”
“I don’t know. Apparently he’s incontinent and it’s making his life hell. We’ve also agreed to a monthly stipend if we can’t settle after the deposition and this thing ends up going to trial. But that will depend on the economist’s report, which I assume you’ve already ordered.”
“Yup,” I lied.
“Good. And I’m not sure how we play the family court angle. I don’t know the ethical and legal boundaries. I’m not a family law lawyer and I don’t know the rules. I purposefully avoided practicing any area of the law that is messy and emotional. And now thanks to your zealous advocacy I got Lazlis claiming we should be sanctioned, so you may want to research the case law on that as well. Just to make sure we’re not completely putting our foot in it. What else do you think we should do?”
He had never asked me this before. I stood on the cusp of telling him about my encounter with Thomas and my weekend expedition and the pile of deer carcasses but I refrained from doing so. Because I wasn’t sure how he would react.
“Don’t give him anything.”
“Really, Stephen. It’s like a roller coaster with you. Up and down. Hot and cold. Tell me why.”
“Let Lazlis make his threats. All this does is drag out the case. Time is our friend and Thomas’s enemy. We need to make him heel. And the more months he waits for his disability checks and the longer this goes on the more likely he is to heel on our terms and not his.”
Fleeger stared at me.
“There is something about him that I can’t put my finger on and I can’t quite process and it’s bothering the hell out of me. He’s so weak but he was once strong. I think our ability to tolerate pain was once much higher.”
His phone rang unanswered.
“What do you mean?” He was interested in what I had to say. We had crossed a new threshold.
“People were once drawn and quartered. It was nothing to take a punch in the face, let alone twist your ankle.”
“What are you getting at?”
“The guy was a soldier. And then he was practically a soldier for hire, a mercenary, some kind of corporate Hessian. He voluntarily put himself in harm’s way for significant compensation. And now he’s wasting all this time and money and effort and energy because he’s addicted to pain meds, can’t find a job, and can’t take care of his family. He has everything he needs. House, truck, wife, tools, food, a roof over his head. I don’t get it. The only thing that makes sense is that he can’t take some pain. Or, worse, he’s a total liar.”
“I guess I was wrong when I said he was your hero.”
“Elements of him were once heroic but now he’s pathetic.”
His phone rang again and this time he answered it, told them to hold on, covered the receiver.
“Let’s talk later. I want your opinion about how we should proceed with next week’s deposition. But we still need to talk about this,” he said, holding up the invoice. “And start making the time on the bills sizzle. Add some more fat.” With the backs of his swinging fingers he motioned for me to leave his office.
The mailroom clerk had deposited a fresh batch of Thomas’s medical records on my chair. I was tired of reading about h
is night sweats and back pain. About his increased anxiety and dysuria and snoring and dry mouth and ulcers. The man was fine. We all knew he was fine. I knew he was fine. Wacked-out on pain meds and marooned on the other side of fortress America, but fine. I stood from my chair, tossed the records in their box, wanted to toss the box out the window, and felt the pleasure of standing, of blood moving through my legs. My phone buzzed.
“Lunch time,” Kath texted.
“Mos def,” I replied.
The Mexican host, donning a white Eisenhower jacket pinned with a red carnation that looked shot by a flower gun, greeted me as I entered the restaurant. I followed him to a tan leather booth, back to the wall, with a view of the bar and the large, clear windows that looked out onto Lower Broadway.
“Please,” he said, handing me a menu.
I ordered a pilsner and watched the crowd of big-faced women who spent their mornings cardio-kickboxing and power-yogaing followed by low-carb, high-protein, and lightly boozy lunches donning Lululemon pants and tight, zippered sweatshirts. I finished the pilsner and ordered another and dismissed the possibility of Fleeger discovering his cuckoldry around the corner from the office and pondered whether this even still applied postseparation. I knew it did. And I knew what would happen. Fleeger suited as a colonial paleontologist while Attika dusted my prehistoric spine, fossilized inside the earth’s stratum and discovered beneath Thomas’s gut pile.
“You can see here, Robert, where Kath got fed,” Attika says. “And Harker got slaughtered.”
All the Beautiful People We Once Knew Page 18