All the Beautiful People We Once Knew

by Edward Carlson

  “I need you,” I said.

  My words warbled.

  “You’re lying.”

  “I need you.”

  “Is this what you want, Stephen?” she said, waving her hand around her body and her apartment. “You don’t hate this?”

  “No, I don’t. I love this.”

  I needed to play this right. The bottom had yet to fall out. Soggy, yes, but intact. The hard lump of her positions began to thaw beneath the neon kitchen ceiling lights.

  “Do you really want to be with me, baby?” she asked.

  “I do.”

  “Do you know this for certain?”

  “More than anything. I’m falling in love with you.”

  “Really?”

  “I swear.”

  “Oh, Stephen, I love you too.”

  She kissed me and hugged me and I leaned backward into relief, ebullient with her approval. Ignoring the fact that despite the long five minutes something between us still failed to click. Something important, but difficult to reach, yet vital. I followed her to the living room. She offered me a clementine. I was too lazy to peel it. Soncha peeled it for me. She apologized for it being mealy. I said no problem. Kath shoved a clementine slice in my mouth. We still sat in silence. Kath ran her fingers through my hair and passed her hands across my shoulders and kissed me on the back of my neck and said she was exhausted and that it was time to sleep. She entered the peach and yellow light of her open bedroom door. I remained sitting on the floor, unsure whether Kath and I needed to make love to banish the avoided catastrophe. Soncha entered Kath’s room and closed the door behind her and Ali and I sat in silence until he dozed off, still leaning against the divan. Standing in the doorway on one foot, I pulled on my shoes and headed home. Telling myself it was best this way.

  My phone vibrated the coffee table. It was from Robert.

  “Lucky number twenty-three,” he said, “is very lucky indeed.”

  “Good work,” I replied.

  “We ready for the Major Asshole’s deposition?”

  “On it.”

  “Good. We’re all counting on you.”

  23

  THE CASE WHITTLED DOWN to a sole binder of questions and exhibits for the taking of Thomas’s deposition. I felt tall, straight backed, anxiety shielded by preparation and the fact that the other side was near. That I’d both done and had enough. Thomas’s boxes of discovery production lined the conference room windowsill. Like a python swallowing a deer, I had consumed their contents, the tiny colored flags and Post-it notes, the mimeographed fonts of decades passed. I climbed atop the conference table and trained the track lighting to where Thomas would be seated, then crawled beneath the table and removed the glides from the chair’s front legs, thereby cantilevering Thomas’s chair a few degrees forward. No reason to make the man too comfortable. Across the street, a prewar building disgorged a black ball of carbon and it sat there, still, in the hard, warmthless sun.

  The hum of the vending machines, the buzz of the tube lights, the exhale of the building’s ventilation system. Fleeger sat in silent study behind his desk. Fresh. Deodorized. Shaven. The starch pressed into his white shirt and the crinkle of his laundered cotton. Licking his fingers as he turned the pages of my deposition outline. Marking salient points with an index finger.

  “I think we’re good,” I said.

  “OK.”

  “Did that thing with the chair and the lights.”

  “Good.”

  “You think we’re good?” I asked.

  “If you say so.”

  “We’re all set up.”

  “Mmm.”

  That noise which communicated he heard what I said but felt no need to reply. Once it gave rise to the paranoia that he no longer liked me. That my days were numbered. Or perhaps I didn’t do a good enough job. But the days of caring had passed. The window had closed on the crucial verve of focus. I had seen the other side. Soon I would be back at Kath’s side for tonight’s presentation of her protest photographs at Soncha’s quarterly intellectual gathering in the Village. According to Kath, they were all excited to meet me.

  Live free of Fleeger or die.

  Across the hall, Attika entered her office, listening to headphones and removing her jacket. She closed the door behind her. I knocked. She told me to enter as she sat behind her machine. She looked tiny behind the paper stacked on her desk, and hollow eyed. As if the partners had kept her awake all night to test her commitment to the firm’s trials of partnership initiation.

  “How’s Tucker?”

  “Don’t bother me right now with trifles, Stephen.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I got this thing to do and it needs to be filed with the court in a couple hours and that’s all I have to say.”

  Silver hairs coursed through her avocado-relaxed bob. In the span of weeks she had become an older woman.

  “Really, Stephen, I have to work. It’s not that I don’t like you and I don’t want you to get all sensitive about it, but I’m buried here.” She reinserted her headphones and leaned over a notepad. The veins in her forearm bulged as she gripped a pen. “Don’t take it personally,” she almost yelled, on account of the music playing in her ears.

  “Hey Attika.”

  She removed the headphones. I pointed at her arm.

  “Who’s Jamal?”

  She reinserted her headphones and continued working. I stood there in her doorway. She steadfastly ignored me. So much for that, I thought.

  I reentered the conference room. Salved myself with thoughts of none of this mattering anymore. I had something new. Fresh. Exciting. That lived outside these carpeted walls. And it gave me a new perspective. The stenographer extended her tripod and bolted her machine to its base. Her big teeth had imprinted vertical lines in the skin above her lip. She fluffed a lavender bow tied to the front of her blouse. We said hello, exchanged business cards, and she resumed her preparations for transcribing Thomas’s deposition.

  The receptionist paged me, announcing my guest had arrived. I entered the small Kilgore foyer between the conference room and the elevators. Lazlis stood there alone.

  “Where’s your client?” I asked, shaking his hand.

  “Downstairs smoking. He’s a nervous wreck.”

  “Really?”

  “You’d be too if you were in his position.”

  We stood there with nothing to say. The elevator bell rang. Here now was Thomas. He had changed. He was gaunt but also meth looking, as if he subsisted on pop and Twinkies, with deep circles beneath his eyes. His once hedgehog-thick hair now patchy and thin, skull grooved with purple scratch marks where he had scored himself with his fingernails. But the handlebar mustache remained. As did the fresh soft pack of Marlboros with the little blue tobacco leaf stuffed inside his front jacket pocket, the consumption of which had stained the hard, curled tips of his mustache yellow-tobacco mustard. His face had collapsed in various places. It looked possible he had lost a few teeth. He moved like a tired robot, faux-dependent on his four-corner cane and a plastic orthopedic brace strapped around his thorax, a prop that appeared to steady his debilitated lumbar sacrum. In a Warner Brothers’ jean jacket. Marvin the Martian pointing his ray gun. What was it that Martian said?

  “Stephen, you remember Mr. Thomas,” Lazlis said.

  “Yes, sir,” Thomas answered. I nodded my acknowledgment. There was no reason for us to shake hands. We weren’t friends and I wasn’t his lawyer. Fleeger had taught me that.

  Lazlis and Thomas followed me to the conference room. Swinging his four-cornered cane and wincing with each step, I showed Thomas to his designated seat. He paused behind the chair. I looked him up and down. No tactical folder tucked in his pocket, no visibly concealed firearm bulging in his jeans. A WWJD purple rubber band bangle dangled from his wrist.

  “Sir, in the event of an emergency we need to know our exit strategy,” Thomas informed Lazlis.

  “Major,” Lazlis said, folding his finger
s around themselves, as if they were his source of attorney power. “Let’s not say anything until we’re spoken to, OK? The key to these exercises is to say nothing of any consequence that the other side may later use against us. Right, Mr. Harker?” Lazlis said, winking at me, as if he and I were now friends.

  Thomas grimaced as he lowered himself into his chair. He was hard on the eyes. The lights illuminated his oily face and patchy, scratched scalp and soon he would feel the seat’s forward pitch adding some extra stress to that pretend broken back of his. I offered them a plastic tray of bagels and Danishes. Lazlis declined and pressed his shirt against his round belly.

  “Need to maintain this figure,” he said.

  Thomas accepted a cheese Danish and bit into it with a not-quite full set of stained teeth and I poured them both coffee from a cardboard box.

  “How was your trip, Mr. Thomas?” I asked.

  “Jesus saw me here,” he said, wincing in his seat.

  He surveyed the boxes of records aligned the length of the conference room windows.

  “Those all mine?” Thomas asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “How long is this going to take?”

  “A couple days,” I said.

  “I don’t think I can sit for more than two hours at a time.”

  “Because of the pain?” I asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Please, Major,” Lazlis repeated. “Let’s try not to talk so much.”

  Thomas picked at a hand callus as Fleeger entered the conference room and took his seat with one motion. He stared at Thomas, took in his appearance, and looked at me. To confirm that we both noticed the man had changed. RFF monogrammed to Fleeger’s white shirt cuffs and cherry throat lozenge cufflinks. Ignoring Lazlis, Fleeger introduced himself to Thomas and positioned his pen next to his legal pad. He explained for Thomas the rules governing the deposition and that Thomas was to audibly answer questions yes and no because the stenographer was incapable of reporting shakes of the head, grimaces, and nods. It felt as if we were about to sit for an examination.

  “So, let’s begin,” Fleeger said.

  “You sure this building is sound?” Thomas asked Robert.

  “What?” Fleeger replied.

  “What is the probability of this building falling down?”

  “That won’t happen,” Fleeger added.

  “How can you be so certain?”

  “Because I’m certain, Mr. Thomas,” Fleeger said. “Now we’re here today to talk about you. Not the structural integrity of this building. And your claims for compensation that you filed against WorldScore.”

  “What do they call it? The world is not enough?” Thomas said.

  “It’s actually Risk in Profit,” I replied.

  Fleeger stared at me with disapproval. I wasn’t to speak unless spoken to. Thomas surveyed the walls, the ceiling, the floor. Squinting in the lights. He dug his index fingernail into his bare scalp with such force it cracked a knuckle. He shook his head, as if he couldn’t dig deep enough. Lazlis and Robert and I looked at one another. It was a rare moment of mutual concern or confusion; for how long would this continue. Thomas composed himself, rubbed the scar above his eyebrow, where according to the military records he’d been struck by a spent .50 millimeter shell during live-fire rounds in ’82. Thomas pleaded to see the building’s exit plan. His hands shook.

  “Counselor?” Fleeger asked Lazlis, holding up both hands.

  “Now Major,” Lazlis said, almost mimicking Fleeger, the blood coursing through the veins within the circumference of his magnetic copper bangle extracted of impurities. As marketed on TV. “Try not to forget what Dr. Spectrum taught you. That the key to overcoming your phobias is to destroy your imagination.”

  Thomas quieted and bit his Danish. Fleeger explained to Thomas that he wanted to begin with some background information.

  “Sir, I believe you have all my background information,” Thomas replied. “I’ve been sending it up here to my attorney for weeks to answer to you.”

  “That’s true, Mr. Thomas, but we need to hear it from you as well. To corroborate the records.”

  “But I’m not going to know it any better than what’s in those records.” He pointed at the boxes. “Those are military records. I don’t want to say something that contradicts whatever is in all those boxes and then you accuse me again of not being truthful.”

  Lazlis lost his patience.

  “We can’t get you properly compensated, Major, if you won’t play baseball,” he said. “Come on now, you love baseball. Remember we discussed that? How much you love baseball? And how these proceedings are like baseball? We’re tied now, four-four in the bottom of the sixth. You’re at bat, with runners in position. So come on now, let’s play some ball.”

  Thomas sipped from his cardboard cup of coffee.

  “Now, before I begin with my questions, Mr. Thomas, can you tell me whether you are taking any medications today?”

  Thomas nodded that indeed he was taking medications today as he did every day. He removed a clear plastic rectangular tray of pills from his jean jacket pocket, shook it like a rattle, and placed it on the table, pointed at the little chambers one by one, Sunday to Saturday.

  “I take Tuberol and Xyphelene every day. That’s these two. The yellow and the blue-yellow ones.”

  “And those you’ve already taken today, I assume?” Fleeger asked.

  “Yes, and I will need to take another dose shortly.”

  “On account of the pain?” Fleeger asked him.

  “Pain and anxiety, yes. I don’t like to take this brown wafer-looking one unless I have to because it puts me in a coma.” He pointed to a pill almost the size of the Catholic host. “But if I don’t carry it on me then my wife will steal it to get high.”

  “God damn it, Major,” Lazlis snapped. “Do not volunteer that kind of information to these men. They are not your buddies at the VFW.”

  “How many pills do you take per day total?” Fleeger asked, ignoring Lazlis, further conditioning Thomas’s comfort zone, to induce his self-incrimination.

  “About thirty.”

  “About thirty?”

  “Yes, sir. That’s what they prescribe for me at the VA and so that’s what I take.”

  “Thirty. OK,” Fleeger said. “Moving on.”

  “OK, moving on,” Thomas repeated.

  “Yes, sir, moving on. I’m going to ask you some questions about your education, where you’re from. Some basic background information.”

  “I got a bachelor’s degree in aeronautical engineering from Central Florida. I’m forty-five years old. I grew up on the Delmarva Peninsula. Rejoined the reserves after 9/11.”

  “Slow down, Mr. Thomas, please. I didn’t ask you about all this yet.”

  “Blew out my patella at Camp Echo. Conducted black flag operations in the Swat Valley flying body bags out of Peshawar. Went to work for FreedomQuest. Biggest mistake I ever made. Now I got night sweats, anxiety, PTSD, and a bunch of other ailments and conditions I’m sure you’re already aware of. I don’t know what went wrong but something went wrong over there and that’s why I’m here. Because something’s wrong.”

  To divert attention from the fact that he was about to cry, Thomas blew his nose into a napkin.

  “Can you elaborate for me, Mr. Thomas?” Fleeger asked. “What do you mean when you say that something went wrong?”

  “What I mean is, something went wrong over there and it ain’t ever been right since. I went over there with the reserves and then FreedomQuest one type of man and I come back another type of man. It’s a feeling. It’s a real feeling. Like I can’t feel the ground beneath my feet and I can’t tell up from down. And I don’t see what else there is you need to know other than the fact that FreedomQuest caused this feeling and FreedomQuest made me feel off. I’m just off, and I don’t know how to feel on again. Like myself. And still I need to take care of my family and put food on the table and pay the mortgage and I got
this feeling I can’t get rid of and this feeling is making it impossible for me to be myself. It’s killing me.”

  Lazlis nodded in approval and Fleeger let Thomas run with it. To warm him up, become accustomed to sitting twenty-five floors above street level, to the conference room, the omnipresent skyline, the woman working the long-keyed stenographer machine, the track lights now blistering his scored scalp with sweat and the seat adding extra strain to that alleged bad back of his. Maybe it was a good thing he wore that brace, I thought. If his back didn’t hurt before, it would after a couple days answering Fleeger’s questions. Fleeger nodded for me to take notes. I hated when he did this. Because there was no need to take notes when the stenographer was transcribing Thomas’s testimony. I shorthanded salient facts in the margins of the yellow legal pad. Thomas shifted in his chair. Lazlis asked him if he was OK.

  “I’m sore as hell, that’s all,” he said. “But it ain’t nothing I can’t handle.”

  He asked Lazlis if he could take a pill.

  “Of course,” his attorney replied. Thomas removed a red pill from his tray and audibly swallowed it with a mouthful of black coffee.

  The questions and the answers continued. Fleeger asking Thomas to tell us more about his experiences overseas with the military, Thomas pleased to comply—as if someone was finally listening to him—despite the fact we were his adversaries. Lazlis should have admonished Thomas to stay on point but he didn’t. Because he too was susceptible to the pleasurable distractions of his phone: settlement demands, fantasy sports, upcoming engagements. Despite the fact that Fleeger was lancing Thomas like a picador, to fatigue his stamina. And so Thomas rambled and grumbled. About Shia shrines in Pakistan decorated with Christmas lights. The Moldovan hostess in Beirut he punched in the face. Not really a brothel. More like a closet with a sheet. The Chilean sea captain of a Liberian-flagged bulker who offered Thomas’s team the use of her holds for the right price. Chipped granite stairways and broken sidewalk tiles. Hypervigilance in and out of interrogation rooms. A Kurd lying in the cot next to him wearing only a loincloth. The guilt of cheating on his wife with the Moldovan who laughed at him afterward. Rediscovering salvation in Jesus Christ.