Man About Town

by Mark Merlis

  So he thought he was in a position to ask. Kristen said, “I suppose you don’t want the official answer.”

  “Well, I guess I ought to hear the official answer, in case anybody asks. But I …”

  “Okay. I hear you’re likely to get involved again anyway.”

  “I am?”

  “You’ll probably be getting a call from that guy on Flanagan’s staff.”

  “Mullan?”

  “Right, Mullan.” She said the name wearily, as if lately she had been seeing too much of Mullan. “Anyway, you know that break we’re proposing for the pharmaceutical companies?”

  “Oh, the … uh, tax credits for biotechnology innovation zones?”

  “Right. Well, that has to be paid for. We have to find some offsetting savings.”

  “And the Harris bill is it?”

  “If we can ever get the scoring up. That’s what Mullan’s working on.”

  “I see.” He did see. It was pretty elementary: under the budget rules of the time, Congress couldn’t reduce revenues without doing something to reduce spending. If they wanted to give the drug companies a tax cut, they had to find some saving in the same amount. Medicare was the biggest item in the budget; if you needed to find some money it was the obvious place to look. “I see that the credits have to be paid for, but—why is the Administration supporting the credits in the first place? Don’t the pharmaceutical companies have enough?”

  Kristen recited: “We feel that biotechnology innovation zones represent an important opportunity to revitalize the economies of our inner cities.”

  “Oh.”

  There was a silence—during which, perhaps, Kristen considered whether she owed Joel anything more than that official utterance. Joel was nobody. If she went on, it must have been because she didn’t want even a nobody to draw the obvious inference: that someone from the drug companies had given someone in the White House a bag of money.

  “We— Look, I’ve probably said too much already.”

  “I won’t tell anybody,” Joel said. “I’m just curious.”

  “Okay. You know the drug companies were opposing Kiddie Care.”

  “Yeah, I never understood that, either. Why do the drug companies care one way or the other about the child health insurance plan?”

  “It’s some complicated pricing thing. Kiddie Care is a public program, they’d have to give it some kind of discounts. And that somehow affects what they can charge other people. There are these formulas, I’ve never figured it all out. I just know the drug companies were against it and now they’re for it.”

  “Because you gave them this tax break.”

  “That’s it. You know, they’ve got a lot of clout, they could just have killed the kids’ plan. We had to give them something.”

  “Okay, let me see if I’ve got this straight,” Joel said. “You cut Medicare for people with HIV, and that pays for the tax credits, and that keeps the drug companies from killing the child health plan.”

  “QED.”

  Joel was so pleased to have been granted this little peek at the real world, like someone liberated from Plato’s cave, that it took him a few seconds to work out what this clever transaction added up to. “You’re taking coverage away from sick people so you can cover kids.”

  “What?” Kristen said. Not sharply; rather as if the simple equation hadn’t occurred to her. “That’s not …”

  “It’s what you’re doing.”

  “Huh.” Another silence, while she pondered this. Joel was already sorry to have said it. Not just because it was unlikely that Kristen would ever return another of his calls. Because she was probably a decent person trying to get something done, trying to do something good in a zero-sum world, where you couldn’t give anything to kids without taking away from somebody else. Robin Hood didn’t have to get elected: else he would never have robbed the rich, or even the middle class, just robbed the poor to feed the poor. In the most prosperous realm the world had ever seen, the titanic budget had only one lifeboat for steerage. There fell to Kristen—who could have taught somewhere, or worked for some foundation, who had instead come to the White House to work overtime saving the world—there fell to her the dreadful daily task of deciding who could get on the boat. If she cried out, “Kids first,” who was he to scorn her?

  Kristen said, “You know, the Harris bill doesn’t actually hurt anybody. I mean, it’s prospective, it only applies to people who do unsafe things in the future. It wouldn’t be such a bad thing if people changed their behavior and didn’t get sick.”

  “I don’t guess,” Joel said. “It’s hard for people to change their behavior.” It had, for example, been impossible for a middle-aged man, just last night, to abstain from behaviors likely to be on the Secretary’s list.

  “They always leave us with no place to stand,” Kristen said. “We try to do something for them—the military, job discrimination, whatever—and right in the middle of it they show up on TV dancing naked in the streets.”

  “Gay people, you mean.”

  “That’s right.” They scarcely knew one another, he thought maybe he should fill her in on this one little detail she had missed about him. He let her go on. “This is the first administration that ever even said the words ‘gay people.’ We’ve done everything we could. And the voters don’t care so much, except the real nuts. The voters can live and let live as long as … as long as nobody reminds them just exactly what gay people do in bed. As long as nobody rubs that in their faces.”

  “Which the ads did.”

  “Which the ads did. Look, I’ve got a million other calls to return. Is there anything else you needed?”

  “I don’t guess,” loel said. “Oh, what is it Mullan’s going to want?”

  “Like I said, they’re still working on trying to score some savings. Everybody thought you might be able to help.”

  He might be able to help. This was his job, as much as Kristen’s. And if he didn’t help, it would get done. Congress would get its work done with or without functionaries like Joel. They had managed to pass the Fugitive Slave Act with no staffers at all; they could finish the Harris amendment in their sleep. It didn’t matter if he helped.

  He could almost persuade himself. Congress would do whatever it did and Joel wouldn’t be guilty of anything, because he was entirely dispensable. It would all have happened if he had never existed. Of course, the corollary to this splendid rationalization was that it didn’t much matter if Joel was on the planet or not. Didn’t matter to Mullan or Harris, didn’t matter to Sam anymore. Probably didn’t matter much to Michael; if he had never lived, Michael would have found some other old white guy. The planet was crawling with old white guys.

  It didn’t matter if he had ever lived. Lived these thirty years while Petras Baranauskas, maybe, rotted in some rice paddy. He could go down to the Mall right now and check it out, visit that black granite scar in the Mall and maybe trace with his fingers the name of Petras Baranauskas. He had been once, years before, been to the wall and cried the way everybody else cried. The way he cried at movies. The waste, the waste, all those young lives thrown away. So they couldn’t, like Joel, throw their own lives away.

  He had been spared. He hadn’t gone to Vietnam, he had —quite undeservedly—evaded AIDS. Evaded children or a dead lover’s demented parents or any other kind of personal responsibility. Until at last he could tell himself that he wouldn’t be responsible if he helped Mullan a little with the Harris amendment.

  He would help because he liked having this job, so that he could afford to take Michael to dinner, could afford to keep Bate hunting for a dead man, could afford all the perks and superfluities to which he was entitled as a member of the New Class. And it wasn’t his fault, was it, that society had turned out this way? That everything revolved around the needs of the drug companies and all the other companies, that there weren’t any citizens any more, just shareholders and consumers and a few leftover losers who were clambering to get into the o
nly lifeboat? He hadn’t done it. He hadn’t done anything ever. Just somehow drifted into the world that already favored him, it was too hard to make the other world.

  Maybe Petras wasn’t the one who was dead. What was this living he had done, all these years Petras had been hiding or buried? Hearing someone’s heartbeat nearby, or not hearing it, that was all his life had come to. All he had to look forward to was one more night with Michael, maybe one more after that, maybe … Until he was dead. So he might as well have been dead already. The boy who had been, at fourteen, dumbstruck by a vision of the transcendent had been alive. The man he’d turned into, who had settled for the possible, had been dead all this time.

  What had he been spared for?

  Kristen was right: Mullan called a few days later. “Joel, how’re you doing?”

  “Okay.”

  Mullan waited a beat or two for Joel to ask how he was doing. Joel did not. “Listen, the senator has some interest in the Harris amendment.”

  “Does he?” Joel said, innocently. As if innocence would prevent him from doing whatever Mullan asked.

  “Yeah, but we’ve got this scoring problem. Here’s the deal: the budget people agreed that there would be this, whatever, deterrent effect. People would stop doing unsafe stuff.”

  “The budget office bought that?”

  “Uh-huh.” Even Mullan chuckled at this absurdity. “So they’re ready to score some savings. Except only way in the future.”

  “How far?”

  “Seven years. See, they say somebody who did something unsafe now might not get sick for five or six years. And then it would be a couple more years before they got Medicare. So they show the savings starting seven years from now; if people start acting safer right away, we’ll save some money seven years from now.”

  “Ah.” Joel’s message light flashed on. Shoot, it was eleven o’clock, Michael was supposed to call from work. “Well, that kind of makes sense. That it would take some time.”

  “But seven years is outside the window. You know that.”

  “Right,” Joel said. “The window.” Congress dealt with the future in five-year chunks. If you did something that saved money in Year Five you could spend all the money in Year One or Year Two. If you did something that didn’t save money until Year Six or Year Seven, you were outside the window: you had nothing to spend.

  Mullan went on. “So if we don’t save anything in the first five years, there’s no point in doing it.”

  What a shame. “I guess not,” Joel said.

  “We gotta move it up somehow.”

  “How?”

  “That’s what I was hoping you’d tell me.”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Well, I hope you come up with something. We’re having this meeting Wednesday.”

  “Wednesday?” Joel said. “Let me see if I’m free.”

  “With the senator.”

  “Oh. I’m free.”

  There were two messages, the first from Michael, the second from Bate. Of course he should return Michael’s call first, so they could make plans for the evening.

  “I’ve found him,” Bate said.

  “Jesus, where?”

  “Mr. Lingeman, you have a balance due.”

  “Of course, sure, I’ll get that off to you, whatever it is. But tell me, where—”

  “Mr. Lingeman, I would prefer to tell you face to face. And I’m afraid I must ask, would you mind very much bringing a certified check?” As if he were a kidnapper, holding Petras Baranauskas for ransom.

  The ransom was nearly eight thousand dollars. Joel had to close a CD prematurely. The woman at the bank mournfully recounted all the penalties that would stem from Joel’s profligacy and impatience. “I’m sorry,” he said, as if he had to apologize for withdrawing his own money. “I really need to get this today.” She shook her head. Possibly she pictured a Mafia loan shark waiting for him in the alley.

  He hesitated before knocking on Bate’s door. He imagined for a moment that Petras Baranauskas would be there, that Bate was actually holding him there, ready to produce him as soon as Joel came with the money. Which wouldn’t, really, have been so awfully much to expect for eight thousand dollars.

  Bate opened the door before Joel could knock. He was startled; he must have been headed out somewhere. He had a raincoat on, though it was a warm, clear day—not a snappy private-eye trench coat, just a drab black raincoat such as a flasher might have worn. “Oh, Mr. Lingeman. I didn’t expect you quite this soon, I was on my way to lunch. I … would you care to join me?”

  Joel considered this for a moment. He was always happy to eat, and he would have liked to learn something about Bate, who was more a mystery than a solver of mysteries. But he expected Bate would reveal nothing—the man barely revealed information he had been paid to obtain—and that instead the conversation would turn to Joel: Joel’s motives, Joel’s plans. Bate would sit in his black raincoat, ignoring his little salad, and watch as Joel, mouth full, tried to explain what he could not explain to himself.

  “I’m sorry,” Joel said. “I hate to hold up your lunch, but I need to get back to the Hill.”

  “Certainly.” Bate stepped aside to admit Joel, closed the door, sat behind his desk, still in his raincoat.

  “I brought the check.”

  “Thank you.”

  Joel held out the envelope. Bate nodded toward a corner of the desk. Joel put the envelope there and said, “So where is he?”

  “Just one minute, if you please, Mr. Lingeman. I have a document I must ask you to sign.” He pulled a sheet from the typewriter—two sheets, rather, with the world’s last piece of carbon paper between them. “This merely certifies that you engaged me to locate an individual, that you did not disclose to me the nature of your business with that individual, and that you have no intention of using any information I supply for the purpose of committing any—”

  “A release? You want me to sign a release?”

  “It seems prudent.”

  “Okay.” Joel signed on the line next, to his name, halfway down. Bate signed, filling the remainder of the page.

  “Thank you,” Bate said. “Roseville, New Jersey.”

  “What?”

  “1693 Bridge Street, Roseville, New Jersey.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “He went away. He came back.”

  “So you didn’t have to hunt very hard,” Joel said, eyeing the envelope with the check in it.

  “I’ll describe my activities in my report. I’m sorry I haven’t prepared it yet. As I said, I didn’t expect you quite so …”

  He lived in Roseville, New Jersey. Joel formed a silly picture of flowering vines trailing over one of the abandoned satanic mills that you saw from the train, pretty much all he had ever seen of New Jersey. That and, “Trenton Makes, the World Takes.”

  He lived. “You’re sure it’s the same guy?”

  “I completed a visual identification.”

  “You … you mean, you went to Roseville?” Joel hadn’t been sure the man even went outdoors. “Did you talk to him?”

  “I didn’t. I didn’t, personally, have anything to say to him. I was able to take a photograph. Would you like to see?”

  Bate reached into his desk drawer and extracted a manila folder. Before he could open it, Joel said, “No. Not right now.”

  “Very well. I’ll be furnishing you a number of other exhibits. I have a credit report, a Social Security earnings history, and—”

  “You’re not supposed to be able to’ get that.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “His Social Security record, no one’s supposed to give you that. I mean, it’s kind of an invasion.”

  Bate stared at him a minute.

  Joel said, “Well, uh, that’s it, I guess. You’ll be sending me this report.”

  “Yes. I’ll get to it right after lunch. I’ll mail it to you or … I suppose I could messenger it, but—”

  “That would be ex
tra.”

  “Yes. These other materials, you might want to look through those now.”

  “No.”

  “They’re really most informative. The earnings history, for example: you can actually track all the gainful employment he’s had since—”

  “I don’t want to know any of it,” Joel said. He didn’t care what dreary jobs Petras Baranauskas had drifted through after his one-shot modeling career. He didn’t care if Petras paid his credit card balances in thirty days or sixty days or never. “I don’t want any of it. Not right now.”

  “Not even the picture?”

  “Least of all the picture.” Of course part of him ached to see the picture, was ready to tear the folder from Bate’s hands. But it was only a picture. Even if he had just paid more for it than he would have had to spend for a painting in one of those pricey Georgetown galleries, it merely referred, as all the other documents in the folder merely referred, attested.

  “I suppose you mean to see him for yourself,” Bate said.

  “I guess I will.”

  “He … he isn’t what you’ve been picturing.” Bate inched the folder toward Joel, tempting him.

  “I’m not sure what I’ve been picturing. I don’t think I’ve been picturing anything.”

  “I mean he’s’ nothing like the young man in the advertisement.”

  “How could he be? But enough that you’re sure about him.”

  “Yes.”

  “How do you get to Roseville? Will I have to drive?”

  “Oh, no, I never drive. You take the Amtrak to Newark, then a commuter train, the …” Bate peeked in the folder. “The New Jersey Transit Kilmer line.”

  “Fine.” Joel stood up. “Look, don’t even bother about the report. And you can, I don’t know, send that other stuff. Whenever.”

  “I always write a report.”

  “All right.”

  “Did you want the other picture back?”