The Bend of the World: A Novel

by Jacob Bacharach

  Mm, she said. Cool. Let’s talk about it later. I knew from the way she said it that we probably wouldn’t. I kissed her shoulder. I think you’re the most normal person I know, I told her.

  She turned her head and kissed my nose. Then you are fucked, she said.

  11

  On the bus the following Monday, because Lauren Sara had the car again, and two dudes were loudly comparing the merits of different strains of weed while the rest of the passengers tried to ignore them. Yo what about the FGD, man? You ever hear of that? No, man, what’s the FGD? That’s the Federal Government Dope, man. That’s the shit the Bill Clinton used to smoke. No shit? No shit. Me, I like the K2. Why’s it called the K2? ’Cause that’s how high it gets you, man. I turned my head. They were about my age, a black dude with dreads and a white dude in a flat-billed Pirates cap. What the fuck are you looking at? the white one said. I may have rolled my eyes. Don’t roll your eyes, man, he said. I’ll roll those eyes out your head. Man, shut up, said the black guy. Leave the man in peace. I turned back around. They got off at Wood Street, my stop as well. The white guy disappeared around the corner. The black guy walked up beside me and said, Hey, my man, you got three dollars you could lend me for bus fare? No, I said. You smoke weed? he asked. I shrugged. Sometimes, I said. You want to buy some? Dude, I said, really? Yeah, man. You got that corporate look about you, but I can tell you burn it down. I don’t have any cash on me, I said. Go get some, he said. How do I know you’ve got any? I asked. How do I know it’s any good? How do I know you’re not just trying to rob me? Rob you? He opened his hands. Because I’m black? I’ve got to be honest, I said. That’s one of many factors. He laughed, a hoot followed by a surprisingly girlish giggle. One of many factors, he said. I like you. Thanks, I said. It’s real and it’s good, he said. I’ll tell you what, I told him. I’ll buy it if you deliver it to my office. Where’s your office? Up there. I pointed. No way, my man. How am I supposed to get in there? There’s security and shit. You think they’re gonna let a nigga with dreads walk up in there with a backpack—he patted his old JanSport—full of weed? Tell them you’re a bike messenger, I said. Security guards don’t give a fuck. I’ll tell them I’m expecting you. Ask for Peter Morrison at Global Solutions. That’s you? That’s me. I’m gonna charge extra, man, for delivery. How much? Seventy an eighth. That seems a little steep. Delivery, he said, pronouncing each syllable emphatically. Right, I said. Come by around nine-thirty. You’re a weird dude, he told me. If you knew my friends, I said, you wouldn’t think so.

  12

  Hey, Rick. Happy Monday, I said. Is that what day this is? he replied. It feels like a Monday, I said. I wouldn’t know, Rick said. I only work here. You and me both, I said. Maybe one of us, he said. Hey, Rick, I said. I’m expecting a package around nine-thirty. Just send him up. Sounds suspicious, Rick said. Drug deal, I told him. Haha, he said. I’ll keep him away from the dogs. This place is buttoned up tight, I said. Oh yeah, said Rick. We’re a regular fucking Alcatraz.

  13

  I deleted some emails and agreed to some meetings and checked out the latest affronts to liberty on the Reason site and saw that one of their writers had picked up the story of the mayor and Marissagate, so-named for his estranged wife, in which the Growing Trend of Important Public Officials utilizing the tools and technologies of the Surveillance State for personal ends was flogged around the track for a few laps. Then Ted stopped by my desk and asked if I’d come to his office, and when I did he said, Close the door, and I said, Ted, are you firing me? and he said, Hell, no, you’re my main man around here, Pete. Okay, I said.

  He tossed his jacket on the back of his chair and we sat down. He was a car nut, and his office was full of framed pictures of exotic Italian cars and signed portraits of drivers; I always thought it looked like a ten-year-old boy’s bedroom.

  Pete, he said.

  Yes, I said.

  You’re buddies with the Other Pete, right?

  I wouldn’t say buddies.

  You get along, though. He doesn’t suspect you of anything.

  Suspect me? I said.

  You know what I mean.

  I didn’t know what he meant, but I nodded.

  I think he’s trying to make a move.

  A move?

  Has he said anything to you?

  Last week he told me that I should try interval training if I wanted to improve my resting heart rate.

  What?

  No. He hasn’t said anything about making a move.

  I heard his name up on twenty-six last week.

  Maybe they’re talking about me, I joked.

  He frowned. No, they’re talking about the Other Pete.

  What are they saying?

  He threw up his hands. He looked simultaneously older and younger than thirty-seven. He had good hair and a broad, dumb face and an air of clumsy athleticism that reminded me of a certain type of lawn-mowing dad—not my own, obviously—a certain type of clunking suburban prosperity that both my poor friends in the city and my family in their rich old Ohio River town viewed with varying kinds but equal degrees of contempt. He was aggressively conventional, and I felt that I ought to hate him, but I liked him, the dummy; for all the injustices that sustained his life, America’s wars and overseas empire, the depredations of business and the inequalities of income, the immiseration of the world’s poor, the destruction of the environment, the extraction of resources, the heedless burning of carbon fuels, the poisons in the water, the collapse of global fisheries—for all these things, which in large and small ways undergirded his four bedrooms in Treesdale and his elementary-school-teacher wife and their daughter and their OBX vacations, I found myself sometimes hoping that none of this would change; that it would all roll on as it was then rolling on, in order that he not be thrown into a different and unfamiliar world in which he couldn’t have exactly what he had and therefore wouldn’t be able to be happy, or to sustain, at least, that facsimile of happiness that so often passes for the real and original thing.

  Well, anyway, I asked him what they were saying about the Other Peter, and he said, It’s nothing specific, but I just get the feeling that he’s trying to leapfrog. These kids, he said—he often referred to these kids, as if he and I were the same age looking down on the twenty-somethings coming up after us, and in this particular case I was pretty sure that the Other Peter was actually a few years older than me—these kids have no respect. You know, they’ve all been told they’re special. Trophies for everything. Everyone gets a prize. And they just expect everything to be handed to them without having to work for it.

  Helicopter parents, I said, because the best way to converse with Ted was to pull a current, topical phrase out of the air and toss it into the air whenever he paused.

  Exactly, he said. My dad, boy. You didn’t get any of that from him.

  You have to pay your dues, I said.

  Of course, on the other side, there’s the gray ceiling. These guys have been here forever, and they’re never going to change. They don’t want the new ideas. Do it our way, don’t rock the boat.

  It is what it is.

  Exactly, he said. Exactly.

  I didn’t imagine that there could be a plot between the oldsters in the executive suites and the Other Peter; even in the abstract, taking Ted’s beliefs about the old and the young employees at face value, it made no sense; but Ted lived, I knew, in a world of self-created anxiety about his status; he’d risen, I gathered, very fast at first and then stalled. Most of the other vice presidents were in their mid-thirties. He felt his few years on them acutely. I promised that I would keep him posted.

  Yeah, he said. That’d be great. Keep me posted. Keep your ear to the pavement.

  I said I would keep an eye out.

  By the way, Pete, he said. Someone told me you’ve been seen palling around with that dickhead Mark Danner. You oughta watch that guy.

  I will, I said.

  He’s not a team player.

  Then ther
e was a knock on the door and one of the administrative assistants poked her head in and said I had a visitor. I headed back to my desk. It was twenty after nine. You’re early, I said as I turned the corner into my cubicle.

  You were expecting me? Mark said. He was sitting in my chair. He was wearing a pale gray suit and there was a VISITOR tag on the lapel.

  Yeah. No. I was expecting someone else.

  I like your area, Mark said. No photos, no tchotchkes, no indication of a human presence.

  I like to keep my life and my work separate.

  Hm, he said.

  I find it hard to believe that your office is full of mementos.

  I don’t have an office. My office is my immediate surroundings, wherever and whatever they happen to be. I’m a starship fitted out for distant voyages of exploration, armed when necessary.

  That’s an interesting turn of phrase.

  I thought you’d like that. So. He gestured to my spare chair, and I saw, despite the smirk, despite the mockery, what he meant about his office, because I felt immediately as if I were the visitor instead of him. So, he said, what Global Solutions have you come up with today?

  I don’t really come up with the solutions, I said. I’m more of a licensing agreements and contracts kind of guy.

  A fake lawyer, Mark said.

  That’s a fair description. I’m probably cheaper than a real one.

  Lawyers are pretty cheap these days. You’d be surprised.

  You’re a lawyer, I said, and I don’t imagine you’re especially cheap.

  I’m a recovering lawyer. The first step is admitting that you’re powerless to control your professional degree.

  So what are you doing here? I asked. I don’t suppose you dropped by just to say hello.

  No, he said. I had some early meetings, and I have some late meetings, and I figured I’d find your oar down in the slave galley to see how hard they make you row.

  I hardly break a sweat. It’s very civilized.

  You know what I like about you, Pete? he asked. I raised an eyebrow. Anyone else, he said, would pretend to be murdering himself to complete a hundred and ninety hours of work in a seventy-hour week. I like your nonchalance. I think you were serious about that unemployment thing.

  Completely, I said.

  Too bad, he told me. I have other plans for you. I’ve been bandying you about upstairs. Preparing the way.

  That sounds ominous.

  It is. How’s your girlfriend?

  She’s well. She mentioned you the other night.

  Oh yeah?

  Just in passing. Whatever happened to your new friend, I believe, was how she put it. I told her I thought you’d already forgotten me. How’s Helen?

  He glanced at his watch. Probably sober, he said. You made quite the impression on her. I tried to find some hint as to his meaning in his face, but he was inscrutable. She asked me to spare you. She said, Leave the poor boy alone and don’t get him caught up in your schemes and conspiracies.

  Tell her I owe her one.

  Oh no. She’d take it seriously, and then at some future point she’d actually try to extract the favor. Better let it dangle. You can owe me instead. We should all hang out again, however. She thinks we need more friends.

  I remember you said you didn’t have friends.

  He smiled thinly. Did I? he said. I say such interesting things.

  Just then my other visitor arrived. Shit, I thought. De-livery, he said, singsong. Hey, I said. Who’s this? Mark said. I’m the bike messenger, he answered. Your shoes are wrong, Mark said. Shit, I said. Mark glanced between us; his eyes did that thing, that sideways wink, that high-speed scan of the circumstances. He bore his canines and grinned. Peter Morrison, he said. At work, no less. You dog.

  14

  We stopped at the newsstand on Liberty and Mark bought rolling papers and tobacco, because Mark said he only ever smoked spliffs, and then we walked down to the Point and got stoned sitting on the wide steps between the fountain and the rivers. This was the point of mystical convergence, the weak spot between worlds where Winston Pringle’s byzantine Project was supposed to break through the opalescent barrier dividing one second from the preceding and subsequent seconds, one world of potentiality from the next. Right now it was under construction, the whole sprawling bowl and the stocky pump houses cordoned off by temporary chain-link. There was one forlorn backhoe, and a couple of workmen in hard hats leaned against it as if they had nothing else to do in the world. Johnny would have said the superficial renovation was just a cover for the real construction deep underground, but to me it seemed like the typical Pittsburgh construction project, itself an exercise in a more mundane sort of time manipulation, the hours stretched to days, the days to months. I thought I remembered reading somewhere that the work was scheduled well into 2015. How would the Mayan calendar account for all that?

  There was a faint hint of life on the trees in the park and on the trees across the water on the bluff of the West End Overlook—the warm, wet month just past was hurrying the living spring along. A bus crossed the West End Bridge over the Ohio. The West End Bridge always makes me think of the end of the world, I said. How so? asked Mark. He flicked our roach in a high arc; it hit the river and was gone. There were ducks in the water. The winter had been so mild that they’d never left. I don’t know, I said. It looks like it should be a ruin. Well, said Mark, I guess we’ll have to wait and see. Wait for what? The end of the world? I said. He shrugged and leaned back on his elbows. His jacket was across his lap. I don’t think any of us is going to live to see it, I said. Hm, he said. That’s the point, isn’t it? No one sees the end of the world. That’s what makes it the end of the world. The end of the world is like the horizon. The bend of the world, I said to that. Yeah, he smiled. Yeah. That’s good. But, I said, there’s more world beyond the horizon. More horizons, anyway, Mark said, which struck us both as very funny and we laughed for a minute.

  Listen, I said, about the other night.

  No, he said. I feel bad. I got you all caught up in the craziness with me and Helen. You got swept up in the wake. Sorry about all that.

  Well, I said, to be honest, I guess I’m thinking more of the, you know, the whatever it was that we saw up there.

  You seem embarrassed.

  Maybe. I’m not sure how to broach the subject. Hey, nice to meet you. Had fun partying. Yeah, things got a little too wild, maybe. Oh, how about the UFOs? It’s the last detail, you know?

  Aren’t UFOs the new thing around here? Don’t you read the papers? Pittsburgh is like space invaders central.

  I guess, I said.

  You know what your problem is, Mark said, though not as a question. You’re jaded, but it’s self-imposed. How old are you, thirty?

  Twenty-nine.

  Close enough. Listen, how many people get to see a genuine flying saucer in their lives? Not many, which is why no one believes they’re real.

  As opposed to: they’re just not real.

  Who cares if they’re real? Give credence to the incredible. He turned toward me, propped on one arm. You saw them. They exist. Whether they’re real or not.

  You saw them, too.

  Yes.

  Well, do you think they were real?

  I think that’s the least interesting question you could possibly ask.

  You’re not interested in whether those things exist or not?

  Well, that’s not the same thing, is it? Obviously they exist. We saw them. That doesn’t mean they’re real.

  So they’re, what, hallucinations? Illusions?

  Probabilities, Mark said. When there’s a ten percent chance of rain, and it rains, is the rain unreal?

  I said, But you can prove it rained.

  How? The rain disappears. It gets absorbed. It evaporates.

  I don’t know, I said. You can record it. You can collect it in a jar.

  Didn’t Archimedes say, Give me a jar big enough, and I will bottle a UFO?

  That sounds
right, I said.

  So let me ask you a related question, Mark said.

  Shoot.

  What are you doing at Global Solutions?

  How is that related?

  Whatever. Pretend it isn’t. The question remains.

  It’s my job.

  Do you like it?

  I don’t know. Do you like yours?

  I don’t have a job. I am a job. I’m the mere human avatar of something wholly inhuman.

  Are you an alien?

  Mark laughed and said, You have no idea. I’m a lawyer. That’s worse.

  I thought you said you were a sort-of lawyer.

  I’m a sort-of alien.

  You know, I said, my friend Johnny doesn’t believe in aliens. He thinks the UFOs are visiting from another dimension.

  That’s still alien, isn’t it? said Mark.

  True, I said.

  Anyway, you’re not answering the question.

  Making money, I said. Working. Getting by. Not all of us are lucky enough to be the human avatar of something wholly inhuman. I giggled. Some of us are just trying to pay the rent.

  Now, that, Mark said, is depressing.

  Let me ask you a question, I said.

  Fair enough.

  What are you doing at Global Solutions?

  Technically, I’m not at Global Solutions.

  Your Honor, I said, please instruct the witness to answer the question.

  Oh, good, Mark said. Lawyer jokes. I told you. I represent the entity that’s going to eat you. You are the giant squid, squidling around in the depths, feeling bigger than everything else. But Moby-Dick is heading for you. You’ve been pinged. He’s got you in his sonar.

  You’re the whale? Or the sonar?

  Oh no. Just a minor tooth.

  You lead a very metaphorical existence, I said.

  Yeah, he said, I do. What time is it? I am literally starving.

  Around eleven, I said.

  Close enough for lunch. How do you feel about Thai?

  15

  On Friday, I got promoted. John Bates and Sylvia Georges called me upstairs, which had never happened before. He was the CFO, and she was the general counsel. If you’d have asked me, I’d have doubted they even knew who I was. We met in a conference room with a view through a gap between buildings to the Allegheny and the North Shore and the first steep rise of the North Hills. An assistant offered me coffee and water. I was such a fool that I thought they were going to fire me, as if either of them would do that themselves. There was another woman there whom I didn’t recognize. This is Jennifer Swerdlow from Metzger Richards, Bates said. Peter Morrison, I said, and we shook. Bates said, You may have heard rumors that the company is for sale. Sure, I said. These are only rumors, Sylvia said. She was in her fifties and looked like she played three matches of tennis every morning. Yes, I said; absolutely. However, Bates said, they happen to be true. His shirt was open at the collar; he had a bit of a belly; you could tell he liked a drink or two. Generally true, Sylvia said. True in a limited and strictly defined sense of the word true, said Jennifer Swerdlow, who was round, though not fat; who might have been the host of a cooking show were it not for her eyes, which suggested that you not look away if you happened to catch them. Right, I said. Let’s say instead that we’re entering into a new partnership, Bates said. A deal, Sylvia said. An arrangement, Swerdlow offered. An arrangement, I repeated. In effect, Bates told me, an equitable merger of entities is being set up to ease a period of transition. However, Sylvia said, the autonomy of one of these entities may, upon the occurrence of certain . . . other events, be terminated, in which case, the other entity will take on a more proprietary position vis-à-vis the prior equal partner. Okay, I said. It seems, Bates said, that you’re acquainted with one of the principal movers in the other entity. He asked for you, Swerdlow said, by name. She picked at one of her nails. She sounded neither pleased nor displeased. I didn’t say anything. Our feeling, Sylvia said, is that, given this existing relationship, and given this person’s clear confidence in your abilities and, moreover, in your discretion in re: the matter at hand, you could very adequately serve as an ongoing liaison until such time as those other events occur. You’re talking about Mark Danner, I said, from Vandevoort. We’re talking in the abstract, said Swerdlow. Right, I said. Well, in the abstract, what happens to me after, uh, the occurrence of these other events? Assuming any of these events occur, said Sylvia, and assuming you take part in them as we’ve just laid it out for you, you would be, along with the group of us managing the transition, insulated from any potential negative outcomes that might accrue to less directly involved employees. Insured, Bates said. Indemnified, Swerdlow said, with emphasis. So this is a promotion, I said. For me. It’s a transition, said Sylvia. What about Ted? I asked. Who? said Bates. Ted, Sylvia told him. That veep I mentioned to you. The forty-year-old? Bates said. Yes, she said. Oh. Bates shrugged. He’s your boss? he asked me. Yeah, I said. Currently. Fuck him, said Bates. He’s a zombie. He’s a nice guy, I said. He’s a zombie, and you’re still human. It doesn’t matter what he was. Keep the shotgun handy. Swerdlow stood up. Are we good here? she asked. I’ve got another thing. Sylvia looked at me. Are we good here? she asked. Then I did something I didn’t know I had it in me to do. How much? I said. What? said Bates. How much money? I said. For me, I mean. Oh. He looked at Sylvia, who shrugged. How’s a buck ten? A what ten? I couldn’t believe it. Sylvia laughed. Obviously sufficient, she said. Great, said Bates. He took my hand in his meaty paw. Welcome aboard. If you say anything to anyone before we tell you, I’ll chop your fucking head off. Karla will call you on Monday to get all the HR shit ironed out. They left me in the conference room alone.