by Matt Ruff
Afterwards, Phil came to see me, and we had a long heart-to-heart about what I was going to do with my life. I’d never told him about the coin, or the voice on the phone, or any of the rest of it, but he talked like he knew: “You don’t need an engraved invitation to do good works in the world, Jane,” he said. “You want to do them, you just go out and do them.” Which, once I got done gagging, actually made a lot of sense to me. So that kind of became the theme of my early thirties.
Good works?
Well, attempted good works. Turns out it’s not as easy as it sounds.
The first couple years, I did a bunch of gigs with groups like the Salvation Army and Goodwill, but I found out I don’t really have the temperament for charity work, especially religious charity work. I decided to try more white-collar stuff—March of Dimes, CARE—but that was just boring, plus I’m even worse at office politics than I am at charity. So then I thought, getting back to basics, maybe what I needed was something with a more disciplinarian bent to it.
Law enforcement?
Yeah. But there I had a different problem: to become a cop, or a prison guard, or even a parole officer, you need to pass a background check, and there were things in my history—like that meltdown on my thirtieth birthday—that made that a deal-breaker. About the best I could do was a job as a security guard, and protecting the inventory at some department store didn’t really count as good works in my book.
So as time wore on, my thirties started looking more and more like my twenties: lots of pointless, dead-end jobs. And then I was thirty-five, and thirty-six, and forty was just up ahead, and Phil didn’t have any more suggestions for me.
And then one day I bumped into my old pal Moon. I hadn’t seen her in twenty years, but this one day I was feeling nostalgic and decided to go back to the Haight, to the street where we grew up. I was standing in front of the lot where the community garden used to be—it had been paved and turned into a skateboard rink—when Moon came along, dragging a pair of kids with her.
She looked great. Young and skinny, not like someone who’d been through two pregnancies. Meanwhile I was definitely the worse for wear, so it took her a minute to recognize me, but when she finally did she gave me this big hug and introduced me to the brood. Then—like this wasn’t depressing enough already—she told me that she and her husband had started their own consulting firm and were pulling down six figures a year working from home. So I came back with this story about how I’d been in the Peace Corps, and if I seemed a little run down it was because I’d spent the last decade fighting AIDS in Africa. Then she had to go, so I gave her a fake e-mail address and told her to keep in touch.
And I was on my way home when I passed by this pay phone, and just on impulse I picked up the receiver. There was no dial tone, but the phone wasn’t dead—it was an open line. “Hello?” I said. There was no answer, but still it felt like someone was listening at the other end, so I said, “If you’re ever planning to call me back, do it soon.”
The next day, I got a jury-duty summons in the mail. I’d gotten calls to jury duty before, and I was about due for another, so it could have been a coincidence. But maybe not…and either way, I figured this was an opportunity to do some good in the world, exactly what I’d been looking for.
It was an arson-murder trial. This guy Julius Deeds, reputed gangster, found out his girlfriend was cheating on him and threw a gasoline bomb into her living room in the middle of the night. She escaped through the back door of the house, but she left three kids upstairs and none of them made it out.
So I was in the jury pool for this, and I was pretty psyched, until it dawned on me that I’d met the defendant before. He’d been at my dealer’s place the last time I went to make a buy.
That’s your drug dealer?
Yeah. Guy named Ganesh.
May I ask what kind of drugs?
The usual kind. Pot of course, speed, Valium, coke on special occasions, acid when I needed a cheap vacation. I know that probably sounds like a lot, but at that point in my life I had it under control.
Anyhow, the last time I’d gone to see Ganesh, about a month before the jury call, he’d come to the door looking scared. Now Ganesh was always a little shaky. He’d studied to be an oncologist before flunking out of med school, and I’m guessing he had a failure mantra playing 24/7 in his head: “I was supposed to be curing cancer, instead I’m one bad day away from doing twenty years in Leavenworth.” This time, though, he wasn’t just nervous, he was sick with fear, ashen with it, like he’d just come from watching his twin get autopsied.
“I can’t see you right now, Jane,” he said, and started to shut the door on me. Then the door jerked open again, and this giant ape of a guy stepped up behind Ganesh and belly-bumped him so hard he nearly fell on his face.
“Hi there, Jane,” the ape said, grabbing Ganesh by the back of the neck to steady him. “What brings you here?”
I kept my voice casual: “Just dropping by to say hi.”
“Oh yeah?” He looked down at Ganesh, turning him like a can whose label he wanted to read. “You sure about that? Because Ganesh here, he likes to sell things to people—he’s not so good about paying bills, but he likes to sell. You sure you didn’t come to do some shopping, Jane?”
“No, really…I’m just here to say hi. But if you guys are busy…”
“Yeah, we kind of are…” He started dragging Ganesh back inside. “So come back later. Much.”
I hadn’t seen or heard from Ganesh since, and I naturally assumed the worst.
I hadn’t seen Julius Deeds since, either. His lawyer had him cleaned up for the trial, but King Kong with a haircut is still King Kong, so I should have recognized him right off the bat. But I was so gung-ho to get on the jury, I spent my first half hour in the courtroom focused on the juror questionnaire. It wasn’t until I got done bullshitting my way through that and handed it in that I noticed Deeds staring at me, trying to work out where he knew me from.
We both got it at the same time. Then he smiled, like Christmas just came early, and all my good intentions went straight out the window. I started hoping three things in quick succession: one, that I didn’t get picked for the jury after all, two, that Deeds hadn’t made bail, and three, that if he had made bail, Ganesh was either dead or out of the country, because Ganesh knew where I lived.
I’m going to guess that none of your hopes were realized.
Of course they weren’t. I’d done such a great job on the questionnaire that I was the first juror seated—Deeds looked really happy about that—and then later, after we were dismissed for the day and I’d snuck out of the courthouse, I saw him on the sidewalk shaking hands with his lawyer.
So I tried calling Ganesh, but his phone had been disconnected. I didn’t know whether that was good or bad. I thought it might be a smart idea for me to skip town regardless, but first I made a stop at the house of this other dealer I knew, to re-up my Valium stash. And it gets hazy after that, but I guess between the Valium and the bottle of vodka I kept in my freezer, I decided not to skip town.
Now there’s one other important thing I haven’t told you, and that’s the date that all this happened. I got summoned to jury duty on Monday, September 10th, 2001. And so the next morning I came to in my living room at around six a.m., and the TV was on, and at first I thought it must be tuned to the Sci-Fi Channel because there was this image of the World Trade Center, and one of the buildings was on fire. Then I saw the CNN logo in the corner of the screen, and I’m like, hang on a minute. And it had just registered that this wasn’t a bad movie, this was real, when the second plane flew in.
I turned up the sound and sat there for about an hour with my jaw hanging open. Then my phone rang.
It was King Kong: “Hi there, Jane.”
Instead of being freaked out like I should have been, like I was supposed to be, I actually felt sorry for the guy, because the world had just turned upside-down and he obviously hadn’t gotten the memo yet. So I sai
d: “Are you near a TV set?”
That wasn’t the reaction he was looking for. “Listen, you stupid bitch,” he said, “do you know who this is?” And I said, “Yeah, I know who it is, and I know you think you’re a badass, but the thing is, you’ve just been trumped.” And he went off, all threats and swearing, but I didn’t really hear it, because it was right then that the first tower went down. A hundred-ten-story building, and it turned to rubble right in front of my eyes, and I realized in this weirdly detached way that I was witnessing a mass murder.
On the phone, Deeds was raging: “Are you listening to me? Are you listening to me?” And I said, “Get fucked, killer,” and hung up on him. There was a moment right after I set the phone down when I thought, That probably wasn’t too smart, but then I looked back at the debris cloud on TV, and by the time the second tower collapsed, I’d put Julius Deeds completely out of my mind.
I took some more Valium and went for a long walk. Around noon I ended up at Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill. By then all the planes had been grounded, and the city was quieter than I’d ever heard it—the only sounds were the wind and a few people crying. I was looking for a place to light up a joint when I saw Phil. We didn’t say anything, just wandered off together and sat down to watch the day go by.
It was after dark when I finally went home. The drugs had worn off enough for me to start worrying about Deeds again, but by then I couldn’t remember whether that early-morning phone call had really happened or was just something I’d imagined. I was wary going into my building, but when I found my apartment door closed and locked, not kicked off its hinges, I figured I was safe.
I let myself in. My TV was on, and that seemed wrong, but I told myself not to be paranoid. I started hunting around the living room for the remote, and then the television shut off on its own, and Deeds said, “Hello, Jane.”
He was sitting in the darkest corner of the room, with a baseball bat across his knees. I looked at him, and the bat, and then at the door I’d just come in by, and he said: “You won’t make it.”
“OK,” I said, standing very still. And he said: “You were right about me being trumped. This morning when we talked, I had no idea. You know they say the body count could be as high as five thousand?”
“Five thousand…”
“Yeah. Kind of puts things in perspective, doesn’t it? Still, it’s not all bad news. My trial, for example: it’s been postponed.”
“Postponed?”
“Yeah. The courthouse was closed today, and the way things are, my lawyer says it could be months before I get a new trial date.”
“I’m happy for you,” I said.
“Oh, it’s not just good luck for me. It’s lucky for you, too.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah.” He stood up. “You’ll have time to recover.”
That’s my last clear memory from that night. I know I did try for the door, and I eventually made it—I was bleeding out on the landing when the neighbors found me—but not before he worked me over. He broke my collarbone, and my right arm in two places, and cracked or broke half my ribs. He also got in one really good shot to my skull—the doctors told me later it was a miracle I didn’t end up dead or a vegetable from that.
I was in a coma for ten days. I woke up in a darkened hospital room with a television playing somewhere nearby. Tom Cruise was talking about a priest who’d died giving last rites to a fireman at Ground Zero. Then Mariah Carey started singing that we all have a hero inside us, and I thought maybe I’d died, and this was hell. But the show went on, with more celebrities coming out to sing and tell stories, and there were calls for donations, and eventually I realized I wasn’t in hell, I was just in America.
The cops came around. I told them I didn’t know who’d attacked me. Then Phil came to see me, and I told him the same thing, but he knew I was lying. I told him to mind his own business.
I had another visitor, too. I first noticed him about a week after I woke up, and for a long while I wasn’t sure he was real. I was in a lot of pain, but because of the coma the doctors were nervous about drugging me. But I kept after them, and eventually they put me on a morphine drip. And I was floating on that when this guy showed up.
He was black, with a round face. He sat in a chair over by the window, watching me.
What made you think he wasn’t real?
The way he was dressed. He had on this cheerleader’s uniform: pink checked skirt, pink sweater with OMF across the chest, pink pom-poms, plus this wig—a yarn wig, like a pink mop head with pigtails.
That does sound a little strange. On the other hand, San Francisco…
Yeah, I thought of that too, but the other thing about this guy, nobody else seemed to be able to see him. The woman I shared the room with had end-stage brain cancer, so she was out of it, but there were nurses and doctors coming through all the time, and they never so much as glanced at him. I tried to draw attention to him without, you know, actually saying anything—if it turned out he wasn’t real, I didn’t want my morphine drip pulled—but no dice.
So finally I gave in, and tried talking to him: “What do you want?”
“What’s the magic phrase?” he said.
“What?”
“What’s the magic phrase?” He lowered his pom-poms and puffed his chest out.
“Omnes mundum facimus,” I said.
“That’s it…Now look under your pillow.”
It took some major maneuvering, but eventually I slipped my good arm under the pillow. My hand closed around a coin. The coin.
I was more relieved than I could say, but I was also pissed off: “Now you show up? Where the hell were you when that asshole was beating the shit out of me?”
“That was an oversight,” he said, frowning. “Not my department, you understand, but I am sorry—it was a busy day, and details got missed.” He brightened again, and laughed. “‘Get fucked, killer…’ I like that. That showed spirit. Not a lotta brains, but spirit.”
“So why now?”
“Well I know you got hit in the head, but you are aware of recent events, right? The organization I represent—that that coin represents—is holding a recruitment drive.”
“You want me to help fight terrorism?”
“No! There’s people all over the country lining up to do that.”
“Well what, then?”
“Well the thing about one big evil taking center stage, it tends to draw attention away from all the other evils. So now somebody’s got to swim against the tide, to make sure those other evils don’t flourish from neglect. You could be a part of that, if you’re interested.”
“But why now?” I persisted. “Those other evils, they were always there, so why didn’t you come for me sooner?”
“Omnes mundum facimus,” he said. “You looked up the translation for that, right? You know it doesn’t mean ‘Wait for further instructions’ or ‘Stand around with your thumb up your ass.’”
“No, but…”
“Let me lay another saying on you: ‘Many are called, but few are chosen.’ Now the implication is that the few are special—brave enough to answer the call, or worthy enough to be chosen. But there’s another way of looking at it. If many are called, and few are chosen, maybe that’s because most of the many have better things to do.” He shook a pom-pom at me accusingly. “You had a life. It was hoped you’d do something with it.”
“Great,” I said. “So you’re telling me you’re the booby prize?”
He laughed again. “I do like that spirit. I—we—can use that spirit. So the question becomes, are you willing to let it be used? Are you ready to be one of the few?”
“You know I am.”
“All right, then…Tomorrow night, between seven and seven-fifteen, you’re to go to the top floor of this building. Turn left out the elevator, and look for a door marked Examination One. If you come early, or show up late, it’ll be just an empty room. But if you come on time, you’ll meet a man named Robert True, who�
�ll tell you what the next step is.”
That was all he had to say to me, but still he sat there, watching me and smiling. “Go ahead,” he finally said. “Ask it.”
“OK. Why are you dressed like a cheerleader?”
“You know what a nondisclosure agreement is, Jane? This outfit serves the same purpose. What do you suppose would happen if you told the hospital staff about our conversation?”
“They’d cut off my drugs.”
“You got it,” he said, and winked. A few moments later a nurse came in and gave me a shot; I fell asleep, and when I woke up again, my visitor was gone. But the coin was still there, safe under my pillow.
The next evening, I made sure I was awake. At quarter to seven I hauled myself out of bed, and wheeled my IV stand to the elevator. I went up to the fourteenth floor and found Examination One, and at 7:01, I knocked.
“Come in,” a voice said.
Inside, the room was a lot like this one. Spare, I mean, with just a table and a couple of chairs. Robert True was standing when I came in. He was wearing a gray flannel suit that might have been stylish back when Ozzie and Harriet was a hit TV show; he was short, and heavy, and didn’t have much hair.
“Welcome, Jane,” he greeted me. “I’m Bob True.”
“Hi,” I said. “Omnes mundum facimus.”
“That’s all right. I don’t need the magic phrase. But as long as we’re on the subject, have you worked it out yet?”
I had, finally. “It’s a comeback,” I told him. “To that thing people say when they don’t want to be blamed for a bad situation: ‘I didn’t make the world, I only live in it.’”
“Very good.”
“So that’s what you’re about, your organization? Making the world a better place?”
“By fighting evil in all its forms,” True said, nodding.
“Are you the government?”
He seemed surprised by the question. “Does the government fight evil?”
I thought about it. For some reason, the first thing that came to mind wasn’t the FBI or the justice system, but my last trip to the DMV. “Well,” I said, “it can.”