Fortunately for humankind, my conscience had an ace up its sleeve. I had never flaked out on meeting a cable company deadline, and this month it was full-blown exposé of the reservoir or nothing. Down to me for the honor of OGAM, as much as for anything else, no matter that it was currently a corps of one. Suppose this exercise in muckraking did get me fired, and achieved nothing else? If I were right, City Hall and everything else in Occam might soon be gray dust.
15
Thanks foremost to my faith in the dissolution of Occam and all my dealings there, I had the backbone to persevere in basement studio through Wednesday and Thursday evenings. I went for broke, and had to trim the fat relentlessly from my show-and-tell-all to fit within thirty minutes. Into the waters of the reservoir I mixed, as it were, the aerolite, the poor afflicted Gardners, subsequent events via my unnamed correspondents, the gilt-framed “Blasted Heath” of 1926, due credit to Francis Thayer, wherever he was, and signs of imminent crisis, entailing corpse-lights, the exodus of dogs, bees, and geese, the upsurge of infant mortality and its associated “crawling skin syndrome,” with variants in parents and vegetation. Excerpts from last month’s history of Gorman County were interspersed, a little recycling that went a long way toward finishing on schedule.
In proposing an exotic pathogen connected with the “Gorman taste,” I carefully steered away from blaming an alien intelligence. Didn’t wish to come across as crazy, which always happened upon introducing ETs, however logical they seemed in context.
Camcorder atop tripod was trained at me while I prefaced clips. My backdrop was that portion of cellar wall free of mold stains and white holes in the plaster’s cyan paint. Beside me, and arching over me, was a dingy plastic ficus, with plastic ivy spilling over the rim of the orange pot and spiraling up wood-grained stem. A loan from the public-access staff, to add some color. I feigned relaxation in a yellow wicker chair, shaped like a punctured sphere, that I’d chucked into the car trunk from off a curb during college in Boston. I rationalized that my unmodish chair remained on the set for luck, despite a need to place conscientious hand just right and hide the missing rattan on one armrest. Seated there, I wrapped up the program with an impassioned plea for viewers to write, phone, or e-mail with any suspicions, from the trivial to the incredible, about the city water or any problems remotely attributable to it. Could I mobilize enough respondents to impel a well-publicized investigation?
During this virtual declaration of war on my employers, at this one-way passage across the Rubicon, I discerned a quailing in my voice and briefly regretted denying myself drink while I was in the studio. I had never dared undertake anything so stupendously and simultaneously right and wrong, depending on personal or professional angle. A craving had taken hold to learn how many townspeople had reported anomalies and met with stonewalling, as opposed to Atwood’s more tractable good do-bees, whose docile silence forestalled riots and panic. Maybe I couldn’t fight City Hall, but the aliens there had unwittingly goaded me into trying.
The episode’s first broadcast was slated for Wednesday, and I was on tenterhooks at work through the intervening days, as if third-floor conspirators had flunkies at Pabodie Cable to check for seditious programming. When the new Chronicles began airing without sign of anything amiss, I was borderline surprised. I had also made ready to celebrate in case my pessimism proved unjustified. This special occasion required special measures to help me unwind. From my socks drawer I’d unearthed the baggie of pot that an anonymous benefactor two years ago had mislaid on paper-towel dispenser in the men’s room at the Aviator. I scraped together sufficient particles to fill a single-hit bowl. Couldn’t recall how long since I’d last smoked.
To float tension-free through my best and final production felt wisest, detached from the fatalism that would have gnawed at me otherwise. In my cannabinol haze I sedately bowed to the inevitability of something somehow snuffing out my public-access career after this affront to authority. Whistle-blowers seldom found themselves bound for glory. I was drowsy from my one measly toke and glad of it, before skimming the end credits that I tacked onto every show out of laziness, though they were now 95% incorrect in an OGAM consisting solely of me.
Aha! Occurred to me then how City Hall had acquired its list of members to hassle. Yeah, the damn outdated credits. Mea culpa, as usual. In my druggy fatigue, I could only shrug. The beauty of a TV in the bedroom was that I was already in bed. An hour before my standard lights-out, I simply switched off TV and lamp and drew up the covers, to begin girding myself with the extra rest I imagined was sorely needed before clocking into the lion’s den tomorrow.
I was unaccountably wrong. The suspense that escalated at every ringing phone or approaching footstep grew intolerable till mid-afternoon, and as nothing kept happening, I became numb, desensitized, to the angst still ramping up my heart rate, my blood pressure. The day’s peacefulness was in itself suspicious. No hectoring Post-its from lowbrow coworkers, no baleful summons from Ms. Lathrop, no hairy eyeball in passing from anyone on the third floor, and I was up there for hours in the City Planner’s anteroom, processing requests for zoning variances. In fact, a studied absence of interest toward me seemed to be the de facto policy. Not the cold shoulder as such, but a case of traveling on paths that never crossed. Come five o’clock, I was feeling less reassured by the lack of backlash than becalmed amidst the ebb and flow of routine activity, and Friday was the same. A foolish impatience began festering in me for my adversaries to deploy whatever was up their sleeves.
Even sillier, I kept expecting face-to-face reprisal. Some approximation of rough but fair play. The customary rebroadcast slot for Chronicles was Saturday at 7 P.M. I tuned in to confirm I’d be equally proud of the show stoned or straight. Different nuances of my swan song, I speculated, would capture my drug-free attention. A minute early, I was sitting up in bed, back against the headboard, with the TV on. The standard between-show filler greeted me, of the station’s programming lineup in six-hour blocks, on screen for ten seconds each, to tonight’s soundtrack of the Turtles’ greatest hits. I drifted along with the listings, through Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, till the title of my own show in the six-to-midnight block jarred me into reading the time in a sidebar at lower right. Two minutes late! Someone was asleep at the switch, I kidded myself. At 7:05, reality broke past my flimsy defenses. While Howard Kaylan belted out how swell he thought Elenore G. was (or was that “Elenore, gee”?), I was muttering about “those underhanded sons of bitches, pulling strings, abusing privilege,” indignant beyond the clarity to distinguish run-of-the-mill crooked pols from cosmic puppet masters. I’ve never been able to hear the Turtles again without gut-level cringing.
For the sake of racking up any sleep that night, I tried cleaving to the less maladjusted notion that I was victim of the latest in Pabodie’s tarnished annals of glitches. Resorted to that rationale whenever musings turned toward the long arm of shadowy persecution, which was pretty often. Spent three discontented hours flipping between a cheesy history of the Roman Empire and funny animal videos and a W. C. Fields movie I’d loved on four previous occasions. I sufficiently lulled myself into dozing off and awaking only twice, quickly putting myself back under by reciting the mantra, “A random screwup. They happen all the time.”
I wore those blinkers of conventional wisdom during morning ablutions and my Sunday breakfast of Portuguese sweetbread and cream cheese, but when I carried a second cup of coffee into the bedroom, intending to watch some news, a blast of static and snow on the screen knocked the blinkers off. I surfed around. Nothing came in. I spared myself pointless inspection of wires and inputs. I knew my cable had been disconnected.
This was one earmark too many of systematic intimidation for me to blame chance, even though it was only the second in twelve hours. With as much anger as angst, I brooded on what a third might involve, to no profit, but spent the afternoon as a moving point, to elude whatever it might be. Groceries and gasoline were on the agenda in any case, and because erring on
the side of pessimism seemed more prudent than ever, I was banking on a permanent shutdown of my cable. I couldn’t even try getting to the bottom of this bullshit for at least twenty-four hours. The tech crew on weekends let voicemail field all incoming calls. What to do except buy a digital converter box and antenna, to thwart being divorced from the world altogether?
Down the street from Dyer Hall, a Radio Shack clung to solvency in the galleria filling the Greek Revival shell of the ex-university library. As I cruised along Ellery Avenue beneath the colossal gateway of the former campus, I remembered that the key to Wil’s apartment was still in my left hip pocket. But I interpreted the lack of activity out front as bated quiet, sold myself the fib that I might brave a visit on the way home, and drove on.
The majority of shops in the galleria were defunct, and Radio Shack’s relegation to the hinterlands of the top floor wasn’t encouraging trade. In the archetypal scent of plastic bonding with metal, the guys by the counter may have been employees or their friends or customers. Or all the above. Reluctant to puncture their social circle, I skulked around on my own till I had the goods to bring over. Of the five guys taking up space, one at the cash register and one idling next to me were creeping me out, through no fault of their own. Their cheeks and necks were puffy, the arm hairs below their button-down short sleeves sporadically stood at attention, independent of drafty air-conditioning, and their complexions under the stark fluorescents ranged from bluish to ashen, with appallingly deep acne pocks. The others paid these symptoms no mind. Were they polite or oblivious?
As the clerk with crawling skin rang me up, I set my sights on the countertop and reconstructed how he and his friend may have sought medical opinion and received a bogus or default diagnosis of some catch-all ailment like cyanosis, with scrips for antibiotics or diuretics or something else no better than a placebo. GPs with a conscience would have referred these patients to a specialist, though the typical weeks or months before an appointment might well prove fatal. Problem eliminated, and with Hippocratic ethics off the hook. The clerk manning the till seemed to have lapsed into a standing coma. The other clerk peeked over his shoulder and told me the total, and I placed exact change on the counter.
Black plastic bag rustled as my purchases went in, and the catatonic clerk shuddered, cleared his throat, and asked hoarsely for my zip code. Was Radio Shack still practicing that noxious marketing ploy? With reflex perjury I volunteered the code for Houghton. He then tried to enroll me in the Battery Club. Huh? Hadn’t that gone belly-up in the 1990s, when this youngster would have been stashing baby teeth under his pillow? His peers ribbed him about yet another hilarious gaffe, and he loosed a few chuckles through his unblinking daze. My face must have telegraphed that I alone was blind to the humor here. “Just ignore him,” someone advised me. “He’s been under the weather lately. Haven’t you, Dexter?” Dexter weakly nodded and smiled. I mirrored his nod, but failed to fake a smile. Were these guys making light of grave affliction because they were too shallow, or secretly too upset, in the absence of more productive options? How many victims and their families and friends were staving off despair with hollow laughter at the unknown?
Careful to retrieve my bag without touching the blue hand that offered it, I nodded again and hurried out. Hadn’t breathed a word in there apart from phony zip code, had I? Odds were poor that I’d regain steady knees till I was out of the building, where three more casualties and their poker-faced companions were in or around the Hallmark Store and Subway and an ear-piercing kiosk.
I put my imaginary blinkers back on at the A&P and the Citgo, confining my scope to merchandise and wallet and gas pump. Why oppress myself with more mental snapshots of suffering, or refine my estimates of how widespread it was, if I were helpless to alleviate it? My self-esteem for the day was based entirely on successful installation of converter box and antenna. At least I could have it out with the company tomorrow without pulling punches for fear it was cable TV or nothing.
Everyone at work resumed last week’s routes of mute neutrality around me. This soon steeped me in a pent-up atmosphere where I was extra chary of committing the least infraction. Therefore I waited till midmorning break to call Pabodie from today’s posting in the Office of Voter Registration. I pressed the extension for a service representative, and a gruff, froggy baritone, more in keeping with the foreman at a nail factory, startled me. In my shirt pocket was this month’s cable bill, which I unfolded while recounting Sunday’s media blackout. He pointedly asked if I’d double-checked the reception afterward, as something that might not have occurred to me. Why yes, I had, though I didn’t mention it was during the course of digital conversion.
I recited the account number on my statement and he ran it down. Yep, terminated due to “delinquent bills” dating to June. I protested. Swore I’d paid off the new bill in my hand. And did I have the cancelled check to prove it? Well no, the bank hadn’t returned it to me yet. Getting harder to restrain my annoyance, to regard this as anything but premeditated runaround, despite the wise misanthrope in me who’d seen it coming.
I struggled to slow my plunge down the rabbit hole. Could I talk to any higher-ups? No, they were at a meeting. Could I bring in the cancelled checks from June and July? No, don’t bother wasting your time and ours, they might be falsified. So why hadn’t the company sent any warnings in the mail? Allegedly it had, to no avail. “It’s your word against our records, pal,” the foreman summarized.
I wasn’t quite resigned to bowing out gracefully. “I’d also like to ask about a show I produce for public access, OGAM Chronicles, that was supposed to air last Saturday night, but didn’t. Any idea why not?”
“I don’t know anything about that.” No, of course not. “But you might want to ask yourself this: who’d you piss off?” He gave that a second to reverberate. “Now is there anything more I can do for you?”
For once, a riposte popped into my head as if by divine intercession. “No, you took back your cable and you took away my show. You want your plastic ficus back too?”
“Do I want what?”
“Oh, nothing. Goodbye.” Might as well quit after spiking one over the net. Break was almost up, anyway. And I had time aplenty to weigh the implications of his blunt pronouncement that I was in the crosshairs, and to figure out whose. The second part was no mystery whatsoever. At issue was purely the percentage of City Hall personnel in cahoots, and I had to suspect everybody, to minimize the risk to myself. Where else in my life was persecution’s long arm poised to reach? That was much more problematic. As was the question of how to advance my crusade from here, since push had egregiously come to shove, and my enemies were no longer satisfied with quietly keeping tabs on me.
Dreaded going home and forbore picturing the aftermath of any retaliatory break-ins there. From the outside, all appeared well, and ditto the kitchen, aside from blinking red light on the answering machine. Gave it wide berth for a while, on grounds that it had to be bad news, harassment, or trouble, till morbid curiosity lured me in and I steeled myself and jabbed the playback button. Then I had to listen twice to confirm what I thought I’d heard. The voice was neither deep nor feminine. Every so often it cracked, or squeaked, under the weight of age. “Hello, my factotum Castro tracked down your number. I want to discuss that program you broadcast last Wednesday. Can you come over here? The sooner the better. This is Francis Thayer.” He entrusted his phone number to me before hanging up. I wrote it on scrap paper I habitually scavenged from work and saved the message.
Made do with a can of B&M beans and a couple of tofu dogs for supper. Keyed Thayer’s number with unsteady finger while my food simmered on the stove. After three rings, a wheezy voice answered, “Thayer residence.” Castro, I presumed. I named myself and reciprocated Thayer’s keenness to confer. I suggested tomorrow evening. Castro begged my pardon and muffled the receiver with what may have been a callused palm. His accent resisted pinning down. Hispanic without doubt, until French inflections cropped up, a
long with some diphthongs that nearly derailed comprehension. Catalan, or Louisianan? Castro removed his palm. “Yes, he says Tuesday is okay, at seven-thirty, please. And he says to tell you, you should eat first.” All right, not that I had a free feed in mind. The address was on an unfamiliar street in Occam. He spelled it out slowly, with European enunciation of the letters that only added to the confusion. We thanked each other with comparable effusiveness, promoting an ambiguity about who was more grateful to whom.
Had to grab the spatula the instant I put down the phone, to scrape scorching beans off the bottom of the skillet. Generally an occasion for exasperated cussing, but I was too acutely giddy. Sleep was a lost cause for yet another night, but not, for once, due to resentments or anxiety.
16
Relations on the job persisted in their unsettling calm. But today I was less sensitive to it by grace of that fabulous rarity, something to look forward to. In a best-case scenario, conversing with Thayer would inspire my next move as heroic gadfly. Locked in the trunk of the Taurus were the lime-green folder, should he care to see it again, and a printout of Mapquest directions. Akeley Street was squarely in the belly of moribund mill district, hemmed in by the river and the Commercial Street Bypass. To conserve time and gasoline, I lingered in town between clocking out and 7:30. The Aviator was en route, and recently I’d been staving off unwarranted cravings for microwave burritos. To be washed down with a draft IPA or two.
Happy-hour office and professional types were mobbing the bar, but most of the booths were open. I reserved one by hanging my sports jacket on a peg in the backrest of the seat, and pointed there while ordering two beers and two “deluxe” burritos from the stalwart barkeep. I watched him as I sat and waited. With scrunched-up features, he probed each customer’s face, and though he didn’t refuse anyone’s patronage, he slid full glass at some with ill-concealed pity and distaste. Not the sort of reaction for which customers would be on the lookout, and these customers were way too self-involved to notice a mere bartender’s expression. Was he searching for early signs of “crawling skin syndrome”? And finding them? In this low wattage, all yuppie complexions looked the same to me.
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