“We’re not too far from my apartment,” he said.
“And how far from a grocer?”
“Three, four blocks.”
“On the way?”
“Could be.”
“There it is, then. We stop off, pick up food, go on to your place, and I fix dinner for us.”
An hour later we sat balancing plates of pasta primavera on knees. The couch and coffee table took up most of his front room. Against the opposite wall, a span of maybe two yards—you could all but reach out and fingerprint the screen—one of his favorite movies showed on TV. Black and white. The Best Man.
“This is great,” Jack said.
“The food?”
“All of it.”
“I agree.”
Wind rattled the window. As we looked that way, rain broke, slamming in bucketfuls against the pane. Henry Fonda mounted an escalator, peering down at the unexceptional man who was now to be president. Their eyes met.
“Gets to me every time,” Jack said.
I looked around. Couch, table, and TV precisely placed, books squared on the coffee table, sections of the morning paper neatly stacked, blue tile coasters. I remembered remarking, when we first met, something overly neat and maybe a little compulsive about him. Jack’s world, here at least, was in order. Which was about as much as any of us can reasonably hope for.
By then I think we’d hit something of an impasse. We had no store of previous conversations, no personal history to rehearse and update, which is what often passes for conversation, and neither of us was much of a storyteller. Worse, each was so private a person as to make us reluctant to ask leading questions of the other. We sat in silence, not an uncomfortable silence, for we hadn’t the gift for that either, discomfort I mean, looking out at the rain.
When the buzzer broke silence, I broke into laughter.
“It sounds like an old man snoring!”
A short in the wiring, apparently. The buzzer would sound, drop away, start hesitantly up, quit again.
“No one comes here,” Jack said, “so I never think about getting it fixed.”
He stepped over my legs to get to the door. A young woman in jeans and T-shirt stood there. Clothes and hair were drenched. A pool of water spread from her feet, as though she were a toy soldier on a base. Briefly her eyes glanced past Jack to take me in. Then she looked back at him.
“Hi, Dad,” she said.
Chapter 10
“I’m sorry.”
“Me too.”
“It was a good evening.”
I’d skedaddled shortly after Deanna’s appearance. Now it was noon the following day and we were having lunch at a Middle Eastern restaurant around the corner from the studio. Starting life as a specialty-food store, Open Sesame had never fully embraced its identity as restaurant. The air was alive not only with the odor of frying foods and rich coffee but also with that of the olives, feta, felafel, canned goods, lentils, teas, and spices sold in quantity from bins in the back and from the shelves that crowded every wall.
“She okay?”
“For a sixteen-year-old, yeah.”
I can’t do it anymore, Deanna had told him, moments after showing up at the door. Jack was helping her dry off with a blue towel; the seams had all unraveled. I hate school, I hate that stupid plaid skirt, I hate fucking (here a sharp glance from her father) violin lessons, and I hate Roberto.
Roberto?
Mom’s boyfriend.
What she wanted to do, she told Jack, was come live with him. She’d get a job, study on her own for her GED. Figured then she’d put in a year at a community college before leapfrogging to a real college.
“She could do all that?” I asked.
“With one arm tied behind her back.”
“And would?”
“If she says.”
“Another pusher.”
“Afraid so.”
Jack bit into a felafel, steam breaking about his lips. He scooped up cucumber and tahini sauce with the remaining half.
“When I was a kid?” he said. “I remember looking around, on the bus, in study hall, in the lunchroom. Thinking how great it would be just to be like those others, not feel apart, be able to float through it all.”
“We all feel special when we’re young. Singled out.”
“Did you?” Then the full weight of what we were saying hit him and he added, “I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, not much childhood there. But feeling special … Yes, absolutely.”
By long habit I sat with my back to the wall, watching the entrance. When the door swung wide, I said, “Excuse me.”
“Girlfriend!” Kimmie and I hugged. “Join us?” One of her companions was Korean and though (as I later learned) in her thirties, looked to be little more than a child. The other was a fiftyish Caucasian, hair dyed dark brown. Standing seemed to cause her pain, but it was pain she’d patently lived with a long time, pain she rarely thought of.
“I’m with someone.”
When Kimmie looked past me, her eyes went immediately to Jack. He smiled. She smiled back.
“Then your lunch, at least, is on me.”
“You don’t—”
She held a finger to her lips. It was altogether possible that Kimmie owned a share of the restaurant, at the very least kept their books, did their taxes.
“Call me, Jen. My little brother is engaged. We’re having a quiet celebration next weekend, just family and close friends.”
Which meant a hundred or more people and food enough for twice that. The yard would be solid with folding tables, chairs, coolers of beer and fruit drinks, exquisitely dressed children, the house’s entryway paved with cast-off shoes.
“My parents would love to see you. Please come, Jen. And bring your friend.”
“I’ll do my best. Give my congratulations to Ken.”
“Of course.”
“So you’ve got a new roommate,” I said after rejoining Jack and telling him about Kimmie.
“Looks like.”
“You talked to her mother?”
“This morning.”
“And?”
“Your basic sturm und drang. Deanna’s my daughter, You’re hardly ever home, What do you know about young women…. Righteous outrage aside, things have been going poorly in the household for some time. For everyone. Once she wound down, she agreed we’d give it a try.”
“Anything I can do to help, let me know.”
“Count on it.”
Back at the studio before settling into work, I did my habitual broken run past a list of online news services. Amid tales of corporate greed, stayed executions, political defections, and puff pieces for athletes and film stars, an eight-line report from Florida caught my attention. A two-year-old girl had survived for nearly three weeks, alone in the apartment, when her mother was jailed. The girl had eaten condiments, raw rice and pasta. When found, she was covered with dried ketchup, curled up in her baby’s bathtub in the apartment’s tiny bedroom.
I pasted the story into an e-mail to Mickie, adding: Could make a good spot. We have a stringer on tap down there? She came back minutes later with Done, and we had footage a few hours later. Cheryl and I watched it that night. Mickie had slotted it in after an update on the kidnapping, as the closing story. I looked over and saw tears on Cheryl’s face, above the bowl of popcorn.
After dinner I threw a bunch of food in an old Trader Joe’s sack and went to check on the squatters.
Snake, who had taken his name after seeing John Carpenter’s Escape from New York, unloaded each item lovingly and placed it on shelves he and his housemates had assembled from boards and random bits of furniture, cement blocks, and bricks. Kind of a Cubist’s notion of shelves: seen simultaneously from multiple angles and perspectives. And the unloading was a kind of mantra.
“Progresso soups—the best.”
“Tuna—capital!”
“Veggies.”
“More veggies!”
“Crackers. If o
nly—”
“And there it is. Cheese!”
“Canned milk. Excellent.”
“Sardines.”
“Green beans.”
“Peanuts!”
Against a back wall Josie nursed her baby. The baby was a frightening sight, as I knew from past visits; looked like dolls for the Day of the Dead. But then so did Josie, making it a toss-up as to whether the baby’s appearance resulted from its harsh environment and deprivation or simple heredity.
Sometimes I think all I’ve learned, the single thing I know, is the importance of letting people get on with their lives. However wretched those lives may be or we think them, much of the time it’s only when others turn up hell-bent on change—family, peers, people with religious, social, or political agendas—that it all goes to shit. We’re adaptable creatures. We make do. We wear the shirts we have.
From farther back in the cave, other squatters acknowledge me. Their form of thanks.
Little Jeanne, who imagines that her Midwest banker husband has, pinned to the wall by his Coffee Master, her likeness from a years-old milk carton.
Buddy, whose father traded shares in offshore drilling for controlling shares in early information technology and now each morning (Buddy is sure of this) sits on the grid of the Internet looking for sunspots: Buddy activity.
Dana, her craving for crack cocaine having supplanted an earlier taste for upscale smelly cheeses, now preferring stacked mattresses and whoever she wakes beside to custom beds and her upstate New York family.
Judy-Lynn, late of Deep South trailer parks, trailing the heritage of same. Jeans cut to show crescents of buttock, shirts tied waist-high. Big hair in sore need of care.
“You guys doing okay?” I asked.
“We’ll make it.”
“We always do.”
“One way or thother.”
“Do you know who’s president?” I asked Little Jeanne. A strand of canned spaghetti—Snake had opened the can and passed it down the line—hung out the side of her mouth. She shrugged.
I looked at their faces. Each a world unto itself.
“President Burke. He’s trying to help you, all of you.”
“Good for him.”
“Good for us.”
“Like some suit’s speeches in Deecee are gonna make a difference in our life.”
“What, you want your fucking food back?”
“You want my baby too?” Josie said. She held it out. Its limbs swung loosely, no sign of muscle tone. Eyes unblinking.
“Look …” I said. A neighborhood newspaper got stuffed in the handle of my front door every other week. The latest issue was triumphant over a cause it had been espousing for months. “I came to tell you something. This building’s being condemned. The city is going to tear it down. Where will you guys go?”
Snake’s eyes met mine.
“Where we always go,” he said. How was it possible that I didn’t know this, his eyes asked. “Somewhere else.”
Chapter 11
“Poor’s not a tag you hang on someone and it’s there for the rest of their lives, like Hester’s scarlet A. Thirty-four percent leave poverty behind within three months of entering it. One out of seventeen people at poverty level go on to become rich people. Economic mobility, opportunity—what America is all about.”
“Kind of scary she has those numbers so close to hand,” Mickie said.
We were watching a news conference with Candace Brocato, conservatism’s current spokesman, apologist, and hired gun. Harvard grad, ex-Yale professor, author of the best-selling Economics for Normal Folk, frequent visitor to her family, who ran a bait shop and fishing dock back in Holly Grove, Missouri.
“Scary enough that we’re sitting here watching it.”
“Research.”
“Right.”
I glanced up to see Luis standing just outside, making frantic come-here signals. We went out into the studio’s main room, where chaos ruled. Luis nodded to the bank of overhead screens monitoring major networks, CNN, local stations. Six of them. All with versions, now, of the same thing. The American people were going to be pissed that their soaps and game shows and Judge Whatsits had been tossed overboard.
There’d been a raid, it seemed, on an abandoned warehouse in Silver Spring. The FBI had received a tip, one of several hundred via their hotline as of ten A.M., suggesting that Vice President Courtney-Phillips’s son might be held there. To this particular tip, for reasons withheld, they gave credence. An FBI SWAT team and a special task force from the Secret Service had gone in. Signs of recent habitation were in evidence, NBC’s anchorwoman said: mattresses, bins of water, fast-food containers, canned food, packaged waste. Another anchor reported the finding of a ragged copy of The Catcher in the Rye—which Reagan had been reading for school.
“Damn,” Mickie, Luis and I said, pretty much in unison.
“At this time there are no further leads,” CNN’s anchor informed us. “Crime units are at the scene, while both local and federal law-enforcement agencies remain on full alert 24/7. Stay tuned for all the latest.”
The phone rang.
“That’s going to be Duane,” Mickie said. The station manager. “Wanting to know how we missed out on this.”
“Precognition?” I asked.
“Years of experience.”
“For you,” Luis told her. “Line five.”
She picked up the phone, listened, and hung up. It was a quirk of hers that everyone had gotten used to, I guess. She carried on entire phone conversations in which she never said a word.
“He has to get in the call to me before he gets the call,” Mickie said. “Closer to the real, we’d call it pecking order. Here, it’s management strategy. What they learn in all those weekend retreats.”
“Such cynicism.”
“Subtext is where the real information hides.”
I held up both palms in mock surrender.
“Speaking for the moment of real,” Mickie said, “how’s Cheryl?”
“Okay, I think. I found college catalogs on the shelf by the tub this morning—she’s a championship bath taker.”
“Plans on the horizon, you think?”
“Who knows? Could just be storm clouds.”
Over the next several hours, divots of new information came off the green with each putt. The ratio was something like one to ninety: for every hour and a half of coverage, maybe a minute of authentic information.
Authentic. I worried that I’d caught a case of special vocabulary, the worst sort of contagion.
We think we’re communicating, Mickie told me once over lunch, we insist that in our culture we’re communicating continuously, but for all the constant noise and the clamor of media in our lives it’s still mostly smoke and mirrors. We have all these special vocabularies, professional, ethnic, personal—with just enough overlap to allow us to convince ourselves we share a common language. We talk and talk, make shadows on the wall with our hands, when all we’re really doing is bouncing the ball from flipper to flipper, trying to keep it up there, trying to keep it in play as long as we can.
Chapter 12
Years and years after, with that shock of recognition said to be a hallmark of great literature, I came across Swinburne’s lines
The four boards of the coffin lid
Heard all the dead man did
and shivered, thinking how old Algernon was so right and so wrong at the same time. He got the sense of having been at a stroke sundered from the phenomenal world, got that closure, claustrophobia, containment. But he never guessed, he’d never be able to guess, what the dead man did in there.
I can’t often recapture it myself, and then but piecemeal, though memory of it, the surety of it, never leaves me. Its bright shadow touches everything I do, everything I see, everything I am.
What I was just then, late evening on a Friday, was bone tired and hungry in equal measure. Cheryl wasn’t home, something that would doubtless become of major concern to me once I�
��d had sleep and, say, a tuna sandwich. I pulled a ratty copy of The Catcher in the Rye off the shelf and fell asleep holding it in both hands, like a lily, against my chest. At some point Jack Collins called. Afterward I could remember nothing of whatever conversation we might have had.
What you are in there is eternally in between, neither awake nor asleep yet dreaming, not of this world nor yet quite out of it, half observing the world, half re-creating it.
A man carrying flowers home to his wife on their thirtieth anniversary is killed on the street by teenagers for the eighteen dollars left in his wallet. One of the gang members presents the flowers to his new girlfriend.
A hundred and nine people are lost when, heavy rains collecting on a flat, unguttered roof, an apartment house in Pakistan collapses.
The charismatic leader of the current regime in New Olgate sees the artillery shell that is his fate bearing down on him and opens his arms wide to embrace it.
About to relieve a subdural hematoma, the neurosurgeon, who has felt poorly all day, himself suffers an aneurysm. In that last ten seconds before he falls, before there’s no longer oxygen to drive the synapses, the saw in his hand continues its ordained task, slicing away much of the patient’s cerebellum.
A ten-year-old feeds his baby sister her bottle just as Mother, who is at work, instructed, carefully burps her, then wraps her in a warm blanket and throws her from the window.
An elderly gentleman stops on the interstate to give assistance to a young woman whose car has stalled and, attempting to siphon traffic around, is struck by a pickup and dragged almost to the next exit. Where is my cane? he asks when the paramedics arrive, Where is my cane? As they look down at what is left of his legs.
The phone rang—a second time, a third? Taut line pulling me back to shore.
Still awash in fragments of dreams, I shuddered.
“Yes?”
“Turn on your TV.” Mickie.
“Our channel?”
“Any channel.” And she was gone.
The TV being an eighty-dollar knockoff special and seldom used, there was a gap between striking flint and getting fire, and when the picture came up, it was as though it bloomed from screen’s bottom, starting small and growing as it rose, like dialogue balloons in comics.
Others of My Kind Page 7