“Really?”
“Yes. Very much so.”
Parminder proceeded to go on for over ten minutes about how the gods are pleased by those who show kindness toward the grayest and oldest of people. She knew it for a fact. Just as Allah commanded Muhammad Ali to beat up George Foreman and Jesus told Tammy Faye to wear lots of makeup and also told George W. Bush to invade Iraq, Nanak told her that young people who help the elderly are deemed virtuous in the eyes of others.
At the fifteen-minute mark, the phone line abruptly went dead. Henrik suspected it had something to do with Jacksonville’s Religious Crusade having established a finite time limit for calls that don’t result in donations. Or perhaps the Ab Lounger Deluxe people installed a time-sensitive algorithm to ensure their employees don’t chat too long on the phone. It didn’t matter. Parminder had told him all about honesty, integrity and being virtuous. He liked the sound of that word — virtuous.
Henrik headed down the street, armed with a determination to become virtuous and by definition, a much more interesting and unique person than he had been just hours ago.
fifteen
Roland was trying to explain to his grandmother exactly what happened.
“But I don’t understand,” she said. “Why wouldn’t you look at the ticket right away when you saw the numbers in the newspaper?”
“I don’t know,” Roland said, his eyes red from crying. In a few short hours, his skin had turned a pale, sickly white color.
“What about that nice girl you’ve been seeing, the one who paid for lunch at Denny’s that time? What does she think of all this?”
“Kara?”
“Yes, that’s it. Kara.” Roland’s grandmother leaned in close and turned on her wise-old-sage voice. “You know, you’ll never do better than her.”
Roland slouched in his chair.
“We broke up.”
“What? Why?”
“It’s a long story,” he said. “Besides, she works with dead bodies. Part of her job is to take off their clothes when they arrive at the morgue. It really freaked me out.”
“Any job that pays well for hard work is a worthwhile venture,” Roland’s grandmother said. She shook her head in condemnation. “Nothing you’ve done makes any sense. You’re very impractical and impulsive sometimes.”
“I know, Grandma. I know,” Roland said. He had come to the old age home seeking consolation but had found little of it from his grandmother. Roland stood up to leave, only to realize he had nowhere to go.
“Let’s look at this practically,” his grandmother said. “What have you lost? You lost a job and a girlfriend and a few friends at work.”
“It’s not just what I lost,” he said. “It’s the way that I lost them. I got so caught up in thinking about what it would be like to be rich that I acted like a total asshole . . .”
“Watch your language.”
“. . . I acted like a total jerk and now I’ve got nothing.”
“That’s not true. You still have your health. And you still have your skills. What is it you do again?”
“I’m a business analyst, Grandma.”
“Yes, you still have your business analyst skills. Why don’t you just go back home and spend the afternoon trying to find a new job? There must be all sorts of businesses out there that need analyzing. I’ll bet you find a job in a jiffy. Someone will be sure to hire a sweet boy like you.”
Roland placed his head in his hands and broke into tears. He couldn’t return to his apartment. He couldn’t find a new job in some other cubicle dungeon. Didn’t she understand that the moment he saw those winning numbers in the newspaper, his life had changed irrevocably? He could never go back to the way it once was — to being normal and poor and living paycheck to paycheck.
A member of the kitchen staff brought Roland’s grandmother her fruit plate for dinner. She looked down at the kiwi and cantaloupe with delight and didn’t understand why Roland couldn’t do the same.
In the distance, Henrik entered the retirement home. He told the receptionist that he would like to read to the old people.
She gave him a funny look and asked him why.
Henrik responded that the elderly are society’s treasures and they should be treated as such.
The easily fooled receptionist smiled and tilted her head a little. She informed Henrik that the residents were eating in the dining hall and that he could read to them after dinner. In the meantime, he was welcome to sit at a table and converse with anyone he wished. She handed him a copy of Moby Dick, a pencil and a piece of paper and sent him on his way.
Henrik shook her hand profusely before entering the dining hall. Upon seeing the populace, Henrik immediately had reservations about talking to them. They were all very gray and very old. Henrik suddenly remembered that as a child he was often afraid of old gray people. At the age of five, Henrik had two grandparents, one on either side of the family. His paternal grandfather was a frail old man with a set of wooden dentures that worked in conjunction with his two remaining teeth, a single yellow incisor at the top of his mouth and a blackened molar along the lower ridge. His maternal grandmother, with her sporadic halitosis exacerbated by a love for French onion soup, was equally challenged in the areas of dental hygiene. Young Henrik never understood why his Granny and Grandpapa lived apart. He assumed that since they’d both lost their partners, they would take up a romance with one another. In addition to curing any residual loneliness, such an arrangement would have made holidays and special occasions much more convenient for Henrik and his parents. This union very well might have worked had Henrik’s grandparents not fought like cats and dogs every time they were together. These arguments would often devolve into screaming matches, at which point a frightened young Henrik would take refuge under his mother’s floral dress.
Henrik gazed around the room. These old people weren’t nearly as scary in person as they were in theory. In general, they looked just like the people from the food court, only a great deal shorter and much closer to death. Henrik noticed that the defining characteristic of the elderly is the pride they take in their ear and nose hair. At least, Henrik reasoned, they must be proud of these hairs in order to display them so prominently. Everywhere he looked there were thick clusters of wiry gray hairs sticking out of noses and wax-filled cobwebs collecting in peoples’ ears. It wasn’t a phenomenon restricted by gender either. Both men and women displayed these with equal vanity. Henrik reached up and touched his own ears. He felt suddenly ashamed of how hairless and clean they were.
The elderly were eating in groups at the tables. Had there been an old pensioner sitting on his own, Henrik might have sat down with him. Instead, he sat at a table by himself along the side wall and flipped open Moby Dick. He felt no guilt for sitting alone. Talking about the weather with these strangers would have been slightly more virtuous than he’d intended his first time out. He would start by reading to them, see if that made him any more pious or unique, and if it did not, he would try making small talk with them next time.
In the far corner closest to the kitchen, blind Conrad and mute Alfred were eating their supper and secretly nursing their pride after the failed assassination attempt. Alfred spotted Henrik right away. His eyes nearly popped out of his head when he saw him. Alfred tried to get the attention of his associates but Conrad was busy searching his string beans for signs of tampering and Billy Bones was off in the distance, having a particularly in-depth conversation with the floor nurse.
“You know I’m not going to do that,” she said.
“You showed them to Karl down the hall last December.”
“Yes,” the nurse said, “but he gave me a two-thousand-dollar tip for Christmas.”
Billy squinted and a large wrinkle formed along the bridge of his nose.
“What? I didn’t hear you.”
“Are you going to give me two grand?” the nurse said.
“Of course not!”
“Why don’t you go down the hall
after dinner?” she said. “Mrs. Komick will show you hers for free.”
“But her breasts are eighty-six years old.”
“And mine are twenty-six years old. And they’ll cost you.”
Alfred hurried toward the corridor by the kitchen where Bones and the nurse were standing. He grabbed Billy’s arm to get his attention. Billy tried to ignore him and when Alfred kept tugging on his sleeve, Billy shot him an angry glare. “I’m getting somewhere here,” he said, somewhat slyly.
“Look!” Alfred yelled. It came out as an inaudible whisper.
The nurse turned and walked her twenty-six-year-old body into the kitchen.
Billy Bones glanced around aimlessly. His senility had increased by at least eighteen percent since the incident in the food court a few hours ago. Alfred grabbed Billy’s head and pointed it toward the far wall where Henrik was sitting in his security guard uniform, quietly flipping through Moby Dick. Billy Bones’ eyes lit up like lightbulbs. The two old-timers hustled over to their table, bumping into each other along the way. When they finally reached their fearless leader, Billy cupped his hands together and hollered into Conrad’s ear.
Conrad reeled slightly from the noise and then his expression turned serious. He pulled his black gloves tight against his hands.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “it appears we have a rooster in the hen house.”
While staring at the copy of Moby Dick lying on the table, Henrik was reminded why he’d never been a great lover of literature. It seemed to him to be a very time-consuming activity and one you would have to excel at in order to truly distinguish yourself as an expert. And even then, you were merely an expert on the recorded thoughts of someone else, not the bearer of your own creation. Henrik read the name Herman Melville and played with the vowels so they rolled off his tongue. He wondered — how did this Herman fellow know he was unique enough to write a novel, and not just any novel, but a great classic of modern literature? Was it something he was born with? Or did Mr. Melville’s novel come to him as a sudden inspiration? If the latter, what was the source of that inspiration? Opium? The word of God speaking to him in his dreams? A combination of the two?
Perhaps I can write a novel, Henrik thought. How hard could it be? He opened Moby Dick and flipped through the pages. Just glancing at the sheer volume of the work, it appeared to be exceedingly difficult after all. Just think of how much work it would be to eliminate all of the typos. He knew he could never complete such an undertaking. And besides, there existed in Henrik a deep-seated fear that were he ever to complete a novel, his work might be considered mere pulp fiction and thrown in with such non-artistic sorts as Clive Cussler and Danielle Steel. He could spend years working on a book containing what he felt were intricate plot twists and brilliantly developed characters only to be labeled generic by a harsh and unsympathetic public. If only there was a shorter, quicker way to self-expression and inner enlightenment.
I know, Henrik thought. I’ll write a poem.
Poetry was a much better creative outlet for several reasons. First, it could be as short as a few lines and still be taken seriously. Moreover, a poem could be abstract and it didn’t necessarily have to follow any specific structural rules. That was definitely a plus. And most important of all, it didn’t really have to make any sense. A poem, Henrik decided, was a work of art by definition.
Henrik took out a blank piece of paper and waited for inspiration to strike but found his muse reticent, tired and truth be told, more or less functionally retarded. He started to write a poem about how difficult it is to write a poem before remembering that an article in the Arts and Life section of last Sunday’s newspaper had described such poems as not only the last endeavor of the uncreative mind, but also utterly insipid and patently boring. Boring. Exactly what Henrik meant to avoid. Henrik dropped his pen in languid frustration.
He thought himself about to cry and decided inwardly what a great thing it would be to cry in this retirement home in front of all these people. They would see by his outward showing of sadness that on the inside he was a deep, brooding soul — mysterious even — one so devastated by the ways of this world that he was compelled to throw decorum to the wind and break down in public in a torrential sea of aching tears. Henrik grew excited by this notion . . . so excited that his welling eyes instantly dried up and he forgot entirely why he’d wanted to cry in the first place.
“Mr. Nordmark.” A tall man with a towering forehead tapped Henrik’s shoulder and introduced himself as the retirement home director. Henrik snapped his head back as though he’d come out of a trance. The dark circles around this man’s eyes were startling. With the grayish hue to his skin and his jet black suit, he looked more like an undertaker than a caregiver for the elderly.
“It’s time to read to the residents now,” the tall man said.
He led Henrik up to a small stage in the corner of the dining hall. A piano took up most of the performance area, but there was a chair for him at the edge of the stage. He sat down and about a third of the seniors shuffled over and took their seats.
Henrik looked them all in the eyes. No one made a sound. He flipped the book open to the first page and stared at the first sentence. This novel appeared to be about a man named Ishmael who really enjoyed sailing. While Henrik expected something entirely different from the deceiving title, he nevertheless thought he might enjoy reading this book about pirates.
Henrik read the first paragraph out loud. It was all going exceedingly well when a sudden orange surge of anxiety lurched up from his stomach into his chest and took root firmly in the base of his throat. Henrik looked up at the elderly expectant faces and then down at the page again. The words and sentences, which moments ago had appeared in perfect symmetrical order, now looked like the crumbled keys of a broken piano. Henrik felt that if he tilted the book to the side, the letters would slip off the page and collapse into a pile at his feet.
Deep inside, he knew this was illogical. This was a book — bound paper, cardboard and glue — nothing more and nothing less. It could have been stage fright that held him motionless. Henrik’s television had told him about the devastating effects of stage fright before. No one was immune, not even great thespians with multiple performances of Shakespeare under their belts. It even affected rock gods like Ronnie James Dio.
More likely Henrik’s predicament arose from the idea that by reading to these old people, he might actually become virtuous and, as a byproduct, unique. That the end of his journey was finally within arm’s reach frightened him to his core. Henrik couldn’t shake the feeling that if he lifted a single page, the world would collapse around him.
Through sheer force of will, Henrik read another sentence out loud. An audible sigh of relief sounded from the gathering of grandmas and grandpas who had been watching this bald man stare at the book in silence for nearly two minutes. Henrik read a second sentence but only got through the first three words before Roland began wailing out loud on the other side of the room. A couple of nurses headed over to make sure he was okay and a crowd of old ladies formed around him. Henrik tried to peer past the women and get a good look at who was crying but he couldn’t see Roland through the assembly line of concerned faces. He grew instantly jealous of the attention the young man was receiving. Sympathy and compassion were much more inviting than suffering through this shoddy recital. Had Henrik not grown so excited at the thought of crying, thus negating his tears just minutes ago, it would have been him surrounded by the gaggle of women. Henrik stood up and slammed the book down on the chair.
“I’ll be right back,” he said and headed straight to the bathroom to have a bowel movement.
From a crack in the open doorway, Alfred and Billy Bones watched Henrik walk down the hallway and enter the public lavatory. Quickly, they shut the door and reported their findings to Conrad. The leader of the assassins twirled the ends of his moustache with fingers covered in black leather gloves.
“Gentlemen, I think we’ve been discovered,�
�� Conrad said.
“That’s impossible,” Alfred mouthed without making a sound.
“How do you think he found us?” Billy Bones said.
“I’m not quite sure,” Conrad said loudly enough for his counterpart to hear. “But I think we have to take his arrival at our home very seriously. This man isn’t just your run-of-the-mill ordinary spy. He appears to be some sort of genius secret agent. I’m afraid we are all in grave danger.”
“What should we do?”
Conrad threw his cape over one shoulder. “We must take his surfacing at our residence as a direct threat. He is a wily one, I assure you. For him to sit in our dining hall calmly reading a book and not even glance in our direction takes nerves of steel. The crossbow is out of the question now. This kind of spy is trained to dodge arrows and bullets. We have to break out the heavy artillery. Get me the briefcase.”
Alfred ran across the room and pulled the briefcase from the back of the closet. He brought it over to Conrad and opened the case in front of his fearless leader. Conrad placed his hands on the objects inside and felt around for one item in particular. He found it in the far left corner.
“I need a volunteer,” he said.
Neither Billy Bones nor Alfred spoke up.
Conrad shook his head. “You both know that I would do this if I could see but I damn well can’t. Now one of you needs to show some courage and take a little initiative here.”
Billy Bones and Alfred remained quiet, their eyes fixed on the floor.
“Fine,” Conrad lost his temper a little. “This is how we’ll do it. I’m going to count to three and we’ll all say Not it. The last person to say Not it gets the assignment. Any objections?”
Alfred screamed a vigorous objection but it got caught in his windpipe and never escaped his mouth.
“One, two, three, Not it!” Conrad said.
The Three Fates of Henrik Nordmark: A Novel Page 10