The Futility Experts

by Margaret Broucek

  “Next Thursday.”

  “Right. Build up some anticipation.” The anchorman watched the camera operator, and when he got a nod, he tipped his hand toward Davis. Action.

  # # #

  Lindstrom’s office was open and empty when Davis tore over there after the last video take. He was mortified that he had waited as long as he had. He didn’t care if Lindstrom came in while he was looking about for evidence—something having fallen between the couch cushions, perhaps. He tipped the trash can to have a look at the debris. Nothing of Megan’s there. No notes from one to the other. No sweet cards left hastily on the desk. What was there, front and center, was the fat, embossed leather notebook that the man lugged around and wrote in during meetings. He was a great one for notating during any conversation. Davis had been surprised when he hadn’t brought it out at dinner. He lightly flipped the cover open. And then he turned the first page, and he continued to flip the pages and found on each mere scribbles. Tornado swirls. Triangles. The guy also favored horses’ heads. Here on one page was the date of the recent meeting to fund lab equipment requests (at which Davis gave an impassioned argument about the vital place of video and audio recording devices in the modern application of the scientific method). On that date was drawn a full side view of a Shetland pony. There wasn’t an English word anywhere in the whole pound of paper. The man was a simpleton. It made complete sense in light of Davis’s experiences with university selection processes.

  He mentally excoriated himself on his way across campus. He had cared more about his own fame than his daughter’s distress. His mood was beyond sour, then, upon arriving at the college’s Crypto Club meeting in the newly designed Center for Student Innovation (an oxymoron). The crypto guys—and they were always all guys—were huddled around a laptop in the conference room with its see-through garage door still open to the hallway. (An ironic tip of the hat to the kinds of innovators who actually dropped out of school.)

  Globsters had been scrawled and underlined at the top of the whiteboard. Right, he remembered, today was Globsters Day; no wonder they were all so titillated.

  “Oh, globsters,” he said. “What have you got on the screen there?”

  Michael Harren, Davis’s primary acolyte, whipped oily packets of hair out of his eyes and slid his laptop slowly toward Davis like presenting proof of a murder. Globsters were always the most frightening of cryptids, mysterious creatures having washed ashore—blobs with teeth or long Nessie-like necks. “This one’s no decomposed whale or basking shark,” Michael instructed Davis. On the screen was a plump, four-legged creature with the skin of a spit-roasted pig, lying on its side.

  “The Montauk monster,” Davis said, nodding cursorily. “What do you see there?”

  “Well, a clear beak, for one. Bird’s head on a mammal’s body,” Michael announced.

  Davis put two fingers over one of his own eyelids and rubbed at the headache beneath it. “You have one photo, one angle. Nothing for size reference there. Is it the size of a mouse or a dog, Michael? What looks like a beak may be exposed cartilage. Decomposition is transformative, guys.” The boys looked insulted. Several, together, pulled the laptop back to face them. Had he been looking at a different screen? “This, I’m here to tell you”—Davis snapped a fingernail against the back of the laptop—“is a drowned raccoon.” He unstacked the pizza boxes, moved them all so they were side by side and continued: “Evidence: long tail. Evidence: fingers. You see the fingers there? Evidence: long legs, too long for anything in the martin genus.” He pulled out a pepperoni slice and took a bite. While chewing, he added, “That’s no monster, guys. The only monsters here are us.”

  # # #

  “No, she seemed fine.” Jenny looked up at Davis, startled at his question. “She sat right at this table and had a slice of pie, and she seemed just fine.” Jenny had been cutting out circles of colored construction paper at the kitchen table and slowly laid her scissors down.

  “Okay, but it was definitely her crying. You know it’s easily identifiable.”

  “She was probably late turning in an assignment.”

  He pulled out the chair next to hers. “I wonder. I really do. Lindstrom is an odd character. I don’t think he makes good decisions. He’s up here in Maine; he’s lonely.” He put a hand on her abandoned scissors. “Did she ask you for the IUD?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, that’s something, see? I think we should confront her, and if she admits that he’s come onto her, I think we should believe it this time.”

  “You want to ruin another man’s life? Graeme Stoltz ended up divorced. For nothing!” She let her hands flop onto her lap.

  “Well, Lindstrom isn’t married, so that won’t be an issue. And I think, other than taking the change jar, which regular kids even do, Megan has been relatively normal for a little while now. So we should give her the benefit of the doubt.” Then he stood like he’d been given an order and walked into the hall to call up the stairs to Megan.

  An ominous silence, until finally she answered with an annoyed “What?”

  “Just come down, we want to talk to you.”

  “What?” she asked again as she slumped into the chair beside her mother.

  Davis walked to the opposite side of the table and leaned straight-armed against it, “I believe I heard you crying in Dr. Lindstrom’s office today. Is that right, honey?”

  “No.”

  “Honey, I know your crying when I hear it.”

  “It wasn’t me!”

  “Were you in his office today?”

  “No!”

  “Let me start this a different way.” He found he couldn’t look at her and continue, so he looked at the floor and cupped his cheeks and paced a small circle while he put the idea forward. “We’re concerned that Dr. Lindstrom may be taking advantage of your affection for him. And if that’s the case, then as an authority figure in your life, as your teacher, he is doing something he should never do. And I want you to know that we would believe you if you said he was doing something inappropriate. We would absolutely believe you this time.”

  “Eric’s not the problem.” She looked defiant.

  “But someone is the problem?” Jenny asked.

  “Someone in this room is the problem, but I’m not going to talk about it.” She stood and returned to the stairs.

  “Megan!” Davis called.

  “I’m not talking about it!” And up she flew.

  “What was that about, Davis?”

  “Who knows?”

  “I think we need to talk with Dr. Peggy.”

  “I guess so.”

  “Me and Megan. I think just Megan and I should call her.”

  “Really?”

  Jenny was red-faced. “She’s not going to talk about anything…sexual. Not with you there.”

  “All right, but do it soon.” Davis retreated to his den, taking the tiny Ebu gogo skull from the hall table with him. He shared a look with her as he rocked in his desk chair. He had something in common with this hobbit lady, he knew. He could feel his time also running out.

  TIM

  Tim entered through the mail room with the intention of asking Mike if he wanted to make a hundred bucks for a couple hours’ work on Friday evening.

  “Really? Move a piano?” The guy drew the last word out, then made a sour face.

  “Yeah, but there’s four guys. Piece of cake.”

  “I dunno, man. I mean, I guess? You’re lucky I don’t have mah-jongg,” Mike said, wagging a paint stick at him from behind the shipping desk. “Hey, you finished Into the Lion’s Mouth?”

  “Oh, God, yes. Twice.”

  “Okay, that Taliban guy who put an AK in our Marine’s face while he was trying to save his friend? And he acted like he was gonna surrender and held one hand up.” Mike held the paint stick in the air. “And then with the other hand, he reached down and pulled the trigger on his launcher, shot a grenade straight into the guy’s chest, and it blew him—poom!—straight
backwards. POOM!” Mike staggered.

  “Then, when the grenade didn’t explode, he smashed the guy’s face in with a rock.”

  “Complete devastation.” Mike beamed. “That’s what I’m talking about.”

  Then, what the heck, Tim decided to ask Mike out for a beer after work, to try cultivating a friendship with him. They could talk about Marine stuff, and Tim had been dreaming about a long string of beers like he hadn’t had in a while.

  “What about tonight? You got mah-jongg tonight, or you want a beer?”

  “I could use a beer,” Mike said. “You know, I’m serious about the mah-jongg thing. I’m very competitive.”

  # # #

  On his way to The Publisher’s office, Tim saw the graphic designer, Jan Middleton, emerge from the restroom. He hated to run into Jan because she could never do a simple greeting. She imposed herself. She jammed herself into your earhole possibly forever.

  “I’m so depressed about Angela,” she said, zombie hands out and threatening to hook him. “I was telling my husband about how she was always so friendly. One example—and I’ve got a million—but one example is that she used to eat these coffee candies I have in a bowl—and if you haven’t tried them, you should stop by. Seriously, take a handful. I’m sure Angela would tell you all about them; God, she loved those candies. You have to order them on Amazon. ’Course one bag was just under the price for the free shipping. That’s how they do it. Hello! Jeez, you’d make about a million bucks selling them over the counter at someplace like Walgreens. Angela said whoever was marketing those candies should have been shot. Because you couldn’t walk in and get them anywhere! So, then last Christmas…”

  Tim imagined himself on an Afghanistan trail, reaching back for a rock, raising it high, and smashing it down on the clattering mouth.

  “Angela said she would send me an entire box of them. That’s five or so bags! I guess because she felt so guilty always eating them, but I didn’t blame her. They were heaven! My husband found them originally—so then, you know, he starts in on me: ‘Did Angela replace the candies? Did you ask her? Did you ask her? Did you ask her?’”

  “Sorry, Jan, hot memo here.” Tim held up his envelope.

  “Oh, yes! Go on! Here I am, talking about coffee candy, for God’s sake! Can you believe it? Move along, sir! Move along.” Then she saluted him as he tripped over himself in his haste.

  Tim handed Rita the envelope with both hands. “This was in Angela’s office, her sales notebook. I know The Publisher wants it. Tell her everyone’s seen it and we’re all impressed with Angela’s last month’s sales.”

  She looked up at him sympathetically. “I see you think I take orders from anyone.”

  Jesus, he could kill them all today. “You can have a different life, you know,” he told her. “Just write it down, what you want. And then don’t give up on it. That’s where people go wrong.”

  She opened her drawer and slipped her hand in for a pad. “Is Clooney with an e-y or just a y?”

  # # #

  Tim carried the first mugs to the table with the same tight smile he’d always had with Emily when they used to come here of a Friday night, a smile he couldn’t rein in.

  Mike met his grin and kicked out the other stool for him.

  This bar, Tip Top Taps, had replaced the Brown Street Tavern, which always featured a line of old regulars at the bar, most keeping their jackets or big coats on in winter to falsely signal that they couldn’t stay, that they had things to do. Men bought each other drinks, claiming rounds with a finger raised. Now the place was a brew pub, and there was real food, but it was too clean, too bright. They had kids’ booster seats stacked up in a corner. It was like a bar at Disneyland. Children negated the main purposes of a bar, like this boy running around their table with his boots untied, snotty face. He would occasionally stop running to grab the edge of their table and wiggle it, forcing the men to keep ahold of their beers. Tim gave an irritated look around the place, trying to share his feelings with the boy’s parent.

  “I bet that Marine sniper would be great to have a beer with,” Mike said. “There are probably a lot of stories he couldn’t tell the guy who wrote the book.”

  With one more shuddering of the table, Tim snatched the kid’s elbow and told him to knock it off. This physical contact sucked the child’s mother over, and she guided the boy away like a collie, then pointed Tim out to her girlfriends at the bar.

  “Okay, I got a story for you,” Tim said, as Mike waved at the women. “I helped this rich woman assess a piano, the most ornate grand I’ve ever seen and with a brand name like an old Russian satellite: Klopotek.”

  “Hot woman?”

  “No, no! An old woman my wife knows.”

  “Well, they can still be hot. I knew this old lady—”

  “Wait, so she buys this thing, and it isn’t cheap, and she has it delivered to her big federal mansion up in Beverly Farms. Then she—”

  “I bought a snowblower from a guy up there. Didn’t run worth shit. Don’t buy from rich people.”

  “Yeah, so then she has me come over to tune the monster, and, well, see, I’m taking these online tuning classes from this pulpy albino guy who looks like he crawled out of a dead cow. And I have almost finished the course, but this is my first real job, so I go over there to tune this barge, and she comes to the door with a little dog in her arms, one of those dogs that if you shaved it, it would be a lizard.” He shimmied back onto the stool for the long haul. “She’s got paintings of this dog all over, like an art museum from a very bad dream. Thankfully, she leaves the house before I start working. Sets my check on a table. Well, every time I strike a key—”

  “Shari Levine, at my mah-jongg. Fifty-seven years old and tits straight out, like on a shelf.” He cupped the air.

  “No, so every time I strike a key, her little dog comes running over and nips me with her needle teeth. Right in the ankle.”

  “What’d you do, kill the little fucker?”

  Tim narrowed his eyes. “Well, yeah.”

  “What I’d’a done. We getting sandwiches?”

  “I’m not getting a sandwich, no.” Tim was angry about the ruination of his great story. It was as though a meal he’d longed for and that was sitting right in front of him had been whisked away before he’d gotten in a single bite.

  “Hey, what’s happening with Tall Blonde Babe?”

  Tim softened. “She’s changed my life.”

  “How so?”

  “Blondie’s the only one who sees me. She knows what I’m capable of.”

  “Blondie. That her real name? What if she had a name like Sophia?” He ran his hand along an imagined marquee.

  Tim wasn’t listening. “It’s hard to explain, but you know what? You should text with her. She knows who you are on my fire team.”

  “I’m a sergeant.”

  “Right, our Humvee driver. In fact, she’s been asking to talk to some of the other guys, so you’d be helping me out. Here’s her number.” Tim showed him his phone screen.

  Mike keyed the number into his contacts. “That was a badass driver in that book, huh? Taking the gunner back in, under fire, over and over again?”

  “You would do that.”

  Mike looked up. “I absolutely would.”

  “Blondie’s living in a very controlling environment.”

  “She of age?”

  “Eighteen. But she doesn’t seem eighteen at all when she writes. She was writing the other day about how she thinks the opposite of bravery is conformity. Right? And it is! Does that sound like something a kid would say?”

  “It does not.”

  “No. And she sent me brownies with a little love note.”

  “Awww. Wait, to Afghanistan?”

  “In care of my father, who’s me, but she knows me as Rusty.”

  “You think that’s a good idea? At your house?”

  “I get packages all the time—tuning tools, piano parts that I buy used. No big deal.�
��

  “I hope not. Maybe your wife could smell the brownies. And you didn’t share the brownies with your team? I’m gonna tell.”

  “Had to get rid of them.”

  “What’re you gonna send her, rocks?”

  “I thought I might get a bullet engraved with our names.”

  Mike laughed a repeated sh into his fist. “What does she think you look like?”

  “I look like me, at twenty-one. I’m myself.”

  “At twenty-one.”

  “Just my face.”

  “That’s good. You pudgy back then?”

  “No.”

  “That’s good. Getting any cybersex?”

  “A little. I don’t have much time alone. We talked on the phone last night. She likes to put her mouth over my ear and pant.”

  “Oh, boy!”

  “I’ve always loved that.”

  “Jeez, who wouldn’t?”

  “I didn’t call her to have phone sex, I wanted to tell her a story. That’s my thing, not that you would know. I can walk into any bar with no money and drink all night, that’s how good I am.”

  “You tell her the dead dog story? That’s kind of a downer.”

  “She’s got a rough life.” Tim drew with his wet finger on the table and pictured the Snapchat photos she’d sent of her family’s kitchen. “She feels she needs to leave her family. It’s really a bad situation—I mean, her dad’s a complete freak. She showed me pictures of this room full of rules on signs that she has to obey.” Tim took a long drink and set the mug down. “‘Sometimes it takes more strength to let go than to hang on to someone.’ That’s what she said. Does that sound like an eighteen-year-old?”

  “Well, you better get the strength to let go pretty soon, Tim, ’cause you are married.”

  “Like hell, I am,” Tim spat back at him. “And I’m never gonna be married. That’s a big mistake.”

  “Well, I’ll agree with you there,” Mike said slowly. Then he downed the rest of his pint and switched to an upbeat voice. “I will text her as your buddy and tell her how fucking awesome you are.”

  Tim leaned over the table toward him. “We’re stationed at Outpost Monti, like in the book. Every day we either train the Askars how to shoot or we go out in a convoy.”