by Martin Riker
4.
Orson Fitz’s first order of business, upon settling into the plane, was to down as much booze as the stewardess would bring him. This was hardly surprising, considering how chaotic his morning had been.
He’d arrived just after dawn at the slaughtering trough (or whatever it’s called), looking less like a crazy old man than simply a very drunk one, with little bloodshot eyes peeking out from his pink face, a nesty poof of white hair, a lanky frame stumbling forth in a bedraggled business suit. The Fortune-Teller was there, propping him up. He teetered this way and that. She helped him hand some money to a man in a bloody apron, and the next thing I knew, the bull’s neck was in a wooden vise, and this pink man’s watery red eyes were up beside me. There was a whoosh, a chop, and everything shifted: suddenly I was looking down upon a head—the very head I had so recently occupied!—now lying in a bloody pile, which we (the pink man and I) proceeded to bend down and drink from, but which thankfully only he could taste. After which it was into a taxi and back to a hotel, where I learned his name (“Good morning, Mr. Fitz!”), watched him vomit into a toilet, waited through a long shower, and finally left for the airport—all this in quick succession—where he was stopped by security over the bag of herbs the Fortune-Teller had given him and had to field some unflattering questions before he could finally board the plane. Once seated, he’d called for booze, then more booze, and now, sated, sat restlessly poking around the contents of the herb bag, and unfolding and refolding the slip of paper inside, upon which were written the Fortune-Teller’s magical words of destiny, the ostensible destination of his “special quest”: UNITYVILLE, PENNSYLVANIA.
Oh exhilarating words!
Though surely less so for Orson Fitz than for me, Samuel Johnson, who had spent the previous night puzzling over the Fortune-Teller’s instructions and by now understood, or felt I understood, what she’d meant. She’d meant that in order to be with my son, I’d need to transport into a body close to his. His own body? A relative’s? And by what means would I achieve this miraculous transformation? The answer was, clearly: I would need to kill the man who carried me there. The “bad mon,” the “dogheart.” How I would kill him I had no idea, and that I would be willing to kill him, that I could manage it morally, had filled me with anxiety all night. Now that I had met Orson, however, and spent time with him, I found myself in complete agreement with the Fortune-Teller on at least one point: if I had to kill someone in order to be with my son, much better this foul Orson Fitz. Much better him than poor Christopher! And I looked back with something like tenderness, then, to Christopher lying gouged in that field. Ineffectual, caddish Christopher, whom I hadn’t actually liked, I supposed, but for whom I’d at least felt some sympathy. Whereas Orson Fitz, this horrible Orson Fitz, with his endless gruff mumbling, with his booze and his rudeness and his elbowy indifference to the poor woman seated beside him—this man left my morals unruffled and my thoughts unfettered, free to indulge, for the duration of that flight, in the unimaginable hope that I might indeed be returning to my son!
Yet when we landed in Philadelphia and Orson attempted to book a flight for Harrisburg, which was the closest to Unityville he could get, he found the flight was not for three more hours; and so great was his impatience, and so weak his resolve, and so fleeting, unfortunately, his drunkenness, that this meager delay utterly uprooted him; and in the ensuing fit, he rebooked himself for Pittsburgh, which is a little over four hours from Unityville by car, but which for my purposes might as well have been Timbuktu; thus, before I even quite knew what was happening, I found myself forced onto yet another plane, yet another flight away from my son, having in the course of the previous fifty or so hours gone from Christopher’s seemingly endless stagnancy to a brief stint in an Antiguan bull to a sudden rush of forward momentum and the most unbelievable windfall of hope—of hope!—only to find myself now worse off than ever, heading toward Pittsburgh with horrible Orson Fitz.
That flight was short, and from the Pittsburgh airport we took a very dreary taxi ride into town.
I do not know if you’ve ever been to Pittsburgh (of course, I don’t know anything about you at all, unless you are my son reading this—if so: your father loves you!—though probably you are not), but I can tell you that the late sixties through the midseventies was not a very good time for that city. All the lung-blackening industries were leaving or had left, and not much of anything was replacing them. Nor were my various personal experiences during my years there particularly wonderful, yet for some reason, to this day, I like Pittsburgh. I remember it more fondly than other places I have been. Is it the rivers and hills? They force the city into unpredictable patterns, hidden enclaves and streets that slope and curve. Each small neighborhood has its own tiny downtown, bakeries and pharmacies pop up in the oddest places, and when you wander around, it feels old, a place with a past, a lot of old houses and cemeteries. Not that I always like old houses and cemeteries—Orson’s house, for example, which was both old and next to a cemetery, I hated from the moment the taxi dropped us off.
It was a narrow three-story with winding, steep stairs that ate up much of the available living space, a claustrophobic tower with mottled light, and if I say that the wreckage of junk and furniture stuffed into its rooms mirrored the inside of Orson’s mind, you will understand this is a figurative expression, that I have no actual insights into the furnishings of the human mind, except to say that as far as I can tell it has no “insides” at all, and that I am only speculating about Orson’s mind based on the life he lived, the ugly life I was forced to witness over the harrowing years I spent with him. The living room alone, where we spent the most time, held a sofa, four lamps, a coffee table, two end tables, three chairs, a television, a writing desk, two rugs, a filing cabinet, and four or five stacks of boxes filled with trinkets and doodads, papers and books, and every imaginable sort of storable scrap. On that first day I did not see any of this, however, for he stopped just inside the door, which opened onto the kitchen, dropped his bags, picked up and dialed the telephone, and:
“It’s me.”
“Oh hello, Mr. Fitz! You’re back!” A young man, in perhaps his early twenties?
“Put David on.”
“Of course! David, it’s Mr. Fitz.”
“Orson, thank goodness.” Somewhat older: midthirties? “Are you back? Please tell me you’re back. There’s so much to go over.”
“Stuck in Philadelphia. I’m calling but I can’t really talk.”
“There are just a few very pressing—”
“Tomorrow. I’ve got bigger worries at the moment.”
“What about the meeting?” This was still David. “How did we—”
“I’m taking over the Mexico project. Who’s been working that?”
“Elizabeth, but she—”
“Have her give what she’s done to Elliot. I’ll be traveling down there soon, so do it right away.”
“You’re going there? Orson, you should talk to her first. There’ve been problems with our Mexican partners.”
“Thank you for that advice, David. There’s no reason you would be aware of this, but I’ve been involved in this business for some years now. That name on the door is actually mine, unfortunately for everyone involved. And while I’ve no doubt that our resident genius Elizabeth has managed to screw up Mexico in ways I can’t even imagine, I somehow doubt her evasive explanations will be a wonderful fucking help to me.”
“Well, I don’t think that’s—”
“Put Elliot back on.”
“Mr. Fitz?” The younger one again.
“Thirty minutes,” said Orson, and hung up.
His car was much nicer than his house (I do not mean to over-gripe about his house, simply that it was awful and we spent so much time there), a powder-blue Lincoln Continental, long and wide with deep leather seats. We drove around aimlessly for a while, or to me it seemed aimless, aimless and hopeless and quite possibly endless, eventually arriving at a large
downtown already closing for the day—the last shift hurrying home, the streetlights coming on. The sky between the high buildings was a heavy gray, nor had I ever seen a sky between buildings before. It was the most vertical place I had ever been, and no one seemed to live there. The shops and even the restaurants were closing, and while I assumed that Orson knew where he was headed among the maze of streets and avenues, still I could not help feeling we were traveling in circles, so identical did everything appear. Then suddenly we were parked. Suddenly we were entering a hotel and climbing into a red booth seat in a bar-restaurant with schmaltzy crooner music piped in—where Elliot, the young man from the phone, waited for Orson’s bourbon and french fries to arrive before asking about his trip.
“My trip!” scoffed Orson. “What a goddamn waste. I go to this place, this so-called clinic, which is supposedly ‘progressive,’ whatever that means, and they say the same damn thing every other doctor says. They can’t find anything wrong. Well, I can sure as hell feel something wrong, but apparently they’re too ‘progressive’ for the idea that a person might actually be able to identify the feeling known as pain when it occurs in his own body.”
“You went to a clinic?”
“I didn’t tell you? Well, I don’t tell you everything. Sometimes I save you the trouble of having to beg my forgiveness for not keeping your mouth shut.”
“I . . . It’s good they didn’t find anything wrong, I suppose?”
Orson, fuming, flagged another bourbon.
“It’s good if there isn’t anything,” he went on, “but if there is something, then it definitely is not good. Call me unreasonable, but I don’t think it will be a great fucking consolation to me when I’m lying dead on a slab and the doctors decide that maybe there was something wrong after all. Oh, do you think so? What an interesting case! How fascinating! And you say he saw it coming? Too bad he only told us directly about it to our stupid fucking faces . . . Of course, then you and all my other employees could throw that party you’ve all been planning.”
“Oh, nobody would—”
“I know what they say about me . . . So what’ve they been saying?”
“Well, yes, let me see . . .”
Now Elliot produced a notebook from under the table and began to report on everything that had been said or done in the office during Orson’s absence: how projects were going, what partners were saying, problems encountered and mistakes made. It was only now that Orson looked at Elliot directly, and I was able to observe the young man up close.
A naturally nervous person, Elliot did indeed appear to be in his early twenties, though he might have been older and only made to seem young by his subservient demeanor. Short hair, rosy rounded features, and glasses unnaturally small to his face. His conversation was incredibly self-conscious, and careful if not conspicuous in avoiding any reference to Orson or Orson’s work, or what the employees thought of Orson, or any fact that might be construed as critical of Orson, or might in any way incur Orson’s wrath. He seemed more comfortable, on the other hand, when criticizing his fellow employees, often by referring to something Orson himself had said. A comment about a failed effort, for example, might be prefaced by “just as you suspected” or “you won’t be surprised to learn,” and would devolve from there into an elaborate finger-pointing, as if the object of the meeting was less to report on problems than to compliment Orson on predicting them. Nor did Orson seem to mind, and before long, and with all the drinking he did while Elliot was talking, Orson’s relative stiffness yielded to something warmer, a conspiratorial friendliness. A calmer Orson calmed Elliot in turn, and by the end of the young man’s report—the better part of an hour—Elliot seemed practically relaxed. By that time, Orson was as drunk as the first time I’d seen him (Was it only this morning? Oh, to be done with this day!), yet other than some stray unpredictable hiccups and thicker, sloppier speech, he was not so different drunk than sober.
“May I ask, Mr. Fitz”—Elliot closed his notebook—“what happened with the talks?”
“What talks?”
“David said your trip was to meet with—”
“Because my mortal illness isn’t enough reason . . . me take a trip?”
“Of course, I just—”
“There weren’t ‘talks.’ That was . . . keep David busy. ‘Progressive!’” Orson scowled. “That whole damn island—”
“You went to an island?”
“Armpit of the Third World. Ended up . . . this witch doctor—”
“You went to a witch doctor?”
“What?” Orson stopped. “No. She . . . like a fortune-teller. Tourist thing . . . Listen, I know I’m not allowed to have any personal . . . unlike you people ‘working’ in the office all day . . . or for however many . . . doing whatever it is you do, but shouldn’t I at least be allowed to have a little . . . considering I’m the only person who ever generates any business for this . . . Anyway I’ll be dead before—”
“What did she say?” offered Elliot.
“Who?”
“The . . . fortune-teller.”
“Oh. Who remembers? Hocus-pocus . . . This little house, hot as hell . . . Like somebody vomited a spice rack . . . I have to go to bed.”
Leaving Elliot with the company credit card, Orson stumbled from the bar, out of the hotel, past his car, and into the Pittsburgh night. By now the streets were deserted, the streetlights were on but the buildings dark, and he made his way around one corner, then another, out onto the avenue, before grabbing hold of a newspaper box and lowering himself to the curb. He leaned back against the box, and in the sudden stillness that followed I was profoundly struck by—silence. Suddenly Orson was silent, and everything around him was silent, and it was surprising, even affecting: a business district after dark. Great waffles of black windows rose up on either side of the avenue, glossy in the moonlight, and I could only imagine that the melancholy feeling it gave me had come over Orson as well, and that this was what had suddenly calmed him. It lasted less than a minute, this feeling, before Orson started grumbling again, that hot-running gurgle of his perpetual disquiet, bubbling up from deep beneath the surface.
But somewhere in that peaceful minute, in the too-short space before Orson’s foulness returned, it had finally sunk in for me: I was really and truly stuck in Orson Fitz. I’d known it—but somehow, up to then, I’d not believed it. It had all happened so quickly, like a dream or delusion. Of course by then I’d come to see myself as incapable of delusions. Long-suffering soul that I was—practically a whole year dead already!—I imagined myself both world-weary and wise, thus impossible to surprise or confuse. But the truth, I now saw, was the opposite: I was still very far from true weariness, and the trials I had faced so far had not even begun to prepare me for all that was to come.
In other words, in that moment, I finally understood something. Tiny and silent beneath those dark waffled towers, in a sense I understood everything. I did not know the particulars of my future, of course, but on a more basic level, I saw my reality in a way I’d not even considered up to then. No matter how large my understanding grew, the world would always be much larger; yet there would also be moments, perhaps no more than two or three I would ever experience, when suddenly and for no particular reason, I would see myself. I would recognize and know myself in a way I normally could not. And that silent minute at the newspaper box I will always remember as being one such instant of clarity. I understood my circumstances as clearly as I do right now. I said to myself (it struck me even then as an odd comment, oddly lighthearted at a time when my heart felt anything but light), I said, Here we go again.
Here we go again, Samuel Johnson.
5.
If I have trouble telling Orson’s story—not just the story of how he became the person he was when I entered his existence but even who he was after that—this is at least partly because I never really understood it myself. I knew he was a grossly negligent, inexplicably successful businessman driven to distraction by t
he seemingly imaginary belief that he had contracted an unidentified yet assuredly terminal illness. I knew that, under the auspices of “business,” he traveled the world seeking new diagnoses—mostly around the U.S., Mexico, and Canada, but with a few trips to South America, and once as far as Finland—by virtue of which I at last saw quite a bit of the world I had sailed past with Christopher, and discovered firsthand that even the most interesting destinations are spoiled by bad company. Ever restless, he seemed never to arrive anywhere, but only to escape, over and over, wherever he’d previously been. I knew that at home he was even worse, sinking ever deeper into a personal malaise, a self-administered slough of drinking, ranting, and obsessing, nighttime philandering and television viewing, frequent business neglecting, excessive self-pitying, and other dull, desperate, or degenerate activities, some of which were initially interesting to witness, but all of which grew tiresome soon enough, and none of which seemed to have an actual cause or object of any sort. As months passed, and then years, I tried to follow along as best I could this story with no beginning, which had (for the most part) a single unlikable character, and which did not seem to know where it was headed or how it would possibly stop.
Fortunately, there is a different story from my time with Orson that is perfectly cogent and much easier for me to tell—and that I am going to tell instead of his—because it is mine, my own story. It is the story of what happened to me during my time with Orson Fitz.