Woke Up Lonely

by Fiona Maazel

  They’d had the hostages for twenty-four hours. Now it was time to deal.

  Norman said, “I found a lighting crew in the area. And someone for hair and makeup. So how about we schedule filming for three o’clock—can we say three?” He swiped a finger across his brow and flicked what was there at the tile.

  Dean’s voice surged above the wheezing stones. “I was hoping to get you first. For gear and training. It’s a brave new world. But we’re ready.”

  Grant stared at his toes, which were bound in sandals and swelled with blood. He was the youngest there, twenty-nine and schooled in technologies that kept the Helix current. “We’re gonna need more bandwidth, that’s for shit sure. Our site’s gonna pop.”

  “Totally ready,” Dean said, with fists upraised. “Bring it on.” He was dappled red in an allotment that seemed miserly in this context—it was 172 by now—but enviable the rest of the time. He never looked flustered; he was totally ready.

  “A ransom tape,” Grant said. “So excellent. It’ll go viral in two minutes, so we have to be prepared.”

  “Exactly so,” Norman said. “And with it, we will get our message out worldwide.” He flung his arms as if to compass worldwide but stopped quick. “Which is the point, right?” And here he looked at Thurlow, whose eyes closed immediately. Norman’s will to believe was profound. He had to believe; what else did he have? “We were stagnating,” Norman said. “Of course. I can see that now. I slept on it, and now I can see it plain. So we’ll use the tape to raise awareness. To let everyone know how dire the situation is out there by having these people perform what it feels like to be alone. To be severed from the world. So really, this isn’t a kidnapping so much as social art. Is that right?”

  “Correct,” Thurlow said, though the word seemed to drop from his lips like a brick. “Now get going.”

  Meeting adjourned. But Thurlow didn’t move. And when he checked in with his will to move, all evidence suggested this torpor would be ongoing. Brave new world? Gear and training? He’d had one night to indulge the romance of what he’d done before the logistics rained out the wedding.

  The four hostages worked for the Department of the Interior, which was odd, to say the least. Who would send these people? They didn’t seem to know themselves.

  Thurlow got changed and went to the den. The hostages were sitting on the floor in burlap hoods, with hands cuffed behind their backs. One of them had been unable to coerce his gams into the lotus position, so he’d taken to flapping them like butterfly wings. Another was davening, less in prayer than distress, like one of the nuts you see in the ward or someone who needed a bathroom. The girl was unmoved, and the Indian—it was like his body hair was about to ignite for the tinder of being here and for the way he hated the Helix. Thurlow could feel this, though the man hadn’t said a word. But it didn’t matter. In a few hours, Thurlow would be in a director’s chair. In the room: four hostages who had no burden except to hold up the day’s newspaper and appear not dead. In his head: his wife and child and the bliss of their return, for which he’d ransom the four alongside the faith of every person who believed in him. Starting with Norman.

  Thurlow adjusted his chair. Turned on the desk lamp. Turned it off. This was all wrong. The angle, the shot, the lighting. He felt like an anchorman for the nightly news. No affect for the relay of trauma, no stake in its outcome. This would not do for broadcast into every home in America. After all, it wasn’t like he didn’t know what happened to a cult leader’s footage in the aftermath of a siege. Especially if people died. Especially if the cult leader died.

  He looked at the camera again. He went: Roll tape, and said, “Now, look: I am not a crazy.”

  But it was impossible to maintain the pretense of dignity with his earpiece vibrating every two seconds. It had been vibrating for hours. It was vibrating now. The Helix was in the news, and everyone wanted to know, What the hell. What the hell, Thurlow? What have you done? He took every fifth call. This time it was Norman, bearing word: The hoods were a bust. They didn’t breathe or wick, and one of the artists—he was calling them artists—the Indian, was getting a rash.

  In the meantime, three calls had been forwarded to his voicemail. The messages were brief. They said: What the hell. Also: Close the blinds. It was hard to know what forces would mass out there against him, but he expected the usual: special ops, trained to kill.

  But don’t worry, Dean said. Message four. The house could take it.

  He looked back at the camera. He felt a little sick.

  01:41:11:09: What else should I say for starters? Nobody wants to hurt this much. Even people who court the hurt, who need the hurt by way of self-recrimination and penance—they do not want this much of it.

  And not for this long. Because after this long, it’s hard to acknowledge that hurt—this hurt—resolves into years of poor judgment.

  On his computer: If my wife comes here with Ida jubhjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjj. He lifted his head and felt where the keyboard had imprinted his cheek. He was in his study. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that receded into the wall. He had planned this room down to the grain of its boards, and yet its blessing was owed to chance. The lights were energy conscious and would turn off for lack of movement after five minutes. This meant that whenever he got to self-immolating about the past, the overheads would go dark and he would come round. Only this time, he’d fallen asleep.

  Norman was at the door. He said, “Working on your speech? Great,” and he marched in to have a look. Thurlow hid the screen.

  “Sorry. It’s just that the crew is here and we’re ready to go. Everyone’s waiting.”

  Thurlow clapped his PC shut. “Look, we only have one shot at this. And I want to get it right. You of all people should appreciate that.”

  “I do, of course, but I also—okay, just look at this”—and he waved a DVD in the air.

  It was a video taken by a Helix Head who’d been emailing them views of Covington, on the Kentucky side of the river. It was a quaint spot, minus the National Guard, stationed in the farmers’ market.

  Norman rolled back on his heels. “So this is exactly as you planned, right? International coverage. Because, just to reconfirm, that is the point, right?”

  “It’s going to be fine, Norm. Don’t worry.”

  Thurlow leaned in close to the computer screen, trying to count heads. Plus the Guard, there were probably one hundred special ops in the market, and more en route.

  “In any case, the artists are ready to go,” Norman said. “I assume, once the tape’s out, we’ll let them go, right? Send them off and, what, pay a fine or something?”

  They paused in this exchange until Norman said, “Oh, you know what I mean. Half of D.C. is Helix. You’ve got friends. I predict you spend one night away from home, tops.”

  Thurlow sat back in his chair. Breathing in, letting out. But it was no good. His body had taken over the discharge of what Norman had roused in him, which was anxiety. Fibrillations of heart and eyelid, a throbbing wen on his forearm that had not been there minutes ago. Water coming down the ducts but stopping short of notice.

  “Certainly no more than a week,” Norman said. “And in the meantime! Anyone skeptical about what we’re doing here is going to change his mind.” Norman freed a sheet of notebook paper from his back pocket. “Not to be presumptuous, but I’ve been pushing some words around and wonder if maybe you’ll consider including some of them in your address.”

  Thurlow pressed the wen with his fist. “What address?”

  “On the ransom tape? Maybe something about how there’s thirty million single people in the country. Or ninety million. How the system is designed to keep us apart. The class divide. The housing gap. Work ninety hours a week in a cubicle at a soul-sapping job whose chief enterprise is to proliferate dialogue about last night’s TV fare, and what are the odds you find someone to hold your hand under the covers at night? Something like that, maybe?”

  The wen seemed like it might er
upt. Or migrate up his arm and into his brain.

  “Norman, get out. I don’t need your help.”

  “Okay, but just in case it wasn’t clear, the United States government has sent the army for your artists.”

  “Hostages, Norm. They are hostages. But they aren’t mine. I did this for the Helix.”

  “Right-o,” he said, and he lifted his palms, which exposed his cuffs, his cuff links, and with them a suspicion Thurlow had been trying to repress since the moment Norman walked in. Cuff links? Really? Because even a conscientious, exemplary worker among men does not wear cuff links in the day-to-day. He told Norman to leave them on the table, which Norman did with vigor, so that they fell to the floor and to a hollow between the baseboard and parquet. Thurlow waited for Norman to leave and shut the door behind him before going after the links. The link-microphones. But they were gone. He took stock of the room. He’d always liked this room. But never mind. He would pack up his computer and papers of import and seal off his study forever.

  But first: rest. He flopped into an easy chair and splayed all the limbs he had. He thought about the hostages. The troops in the market. His wife and daughter and the life they had together, pillaged by a lonely guy who screwed up every chance he got. The lights went out. A siren cried.

  He buzzed for Vicki. At least Vicki would kiss him hello and put her arms around him and be happier for it. He buzzed for her again and got no answer.

  The commissary: Impersonal and square. No weird angles to negotiate, no family photos to remove. Potted plants arranged around a director’s chair. Dean wearing a boonie hat with chin strap and black aigrette pinned to the side, not fancy but more like he’d plucked a duck.

  Thurlow watched him and the gaffer spar in one corner and Norman preside over the hostages in another. Their hoods were still on, though Norman had procured an emollient for the Indian’s neck, which was aflame with rash.

  Dean said, “Almost ready,” and dragged a bouquet of assault rifles across the floor. They were arranged in a tin stand like umbrellas. He prodded a floodlight with the tip of his boot. “Except it’s too dark in here,” he said. “Too Goddamn dark. Hey, Edison,” he said, and he frowned at the gaffer, who was hell-bent on chiaroscuro. “Watch it!” Dean said as the gaffer’s ladder tipped and fell into the director’s chair.

  “Not the chair,” Dean said. “We don’t have another one here. Okay, let me think. I need an hour.”

  Norman, who had been standing by the cheese platter—his idea of craft services for the crew—smacked his head. “An hour? What makes you think we have an hour? Just use a different chair.”

  Thurlow stood. “And get rid of the rifles. Seriously. That’s not what we’re about.”

  Dean looked bereft, as if the seat of passion once vacated by his wife’s death was now vacant all over again. He took Thurlow aside. He said, “You know it’s my job to read everything that comes in here. So you know I’ve seen what the North Koreans have been saying. And I’m all for it. So are a lot of people. So you just say the word. Whenever you’re ready.”

  “I appreciate that,” Thurlow said, and was about to say more when a fist of disappointment and upset grabbed his voice and closed it off.

  He made for the cheese platter. Nine kinds of curd, sliced thin. Those rounds with the red and yellow wax. Antipasto and toothpicks with tinsel finials half-mooned by a swath of wheaty biscuits.

  Then he went back to his room and shut the door.

  03:12:53:12: Some people know their destiny from the start. But not me. And even if I did, it’s not like there’s a manual for how to become what I’ve become. It’s not like there’s a school for brinksmanship or a ladder with rungs visible from the bottom up. There’s not even a school for the presidency of the nation, and yet the road to that job is still clearer than mine. And so, a little about me, because I want people to understand how I got here. Plus, I think my time is running out.

  My parents were part of the middling salariat that votes right but acts left. Men who tout family values while dropping a load at Tart’s Bigbar. Women who abort their kids in secret. They were Reaganites who imposed an old-fashioned aesthetic on the scheduling of our lives, so that we seemed to meet only at dinners, which were opportunities to know each other that we never took. Our family congress was more like antecedent to purdah among friends, which is, not coincidentally, the experience and philosophy I have spent the Helix trying to retire.

  As for my parents, for parents in general, there’s the education they mean to give you and then what they actually give you; in a good family the two are discrepant because at least they tried to give you the best.

  Our kitchen was meat and potatoes and squash, carrots in stock, brisket with pineapple Os, short ribs and stew. By age ten, I could out-girth a keg of beer. Or so I was told by my dad, who found in this razzing a way to be intimate that did not humiliate him. For many dads, the way is violence, so I consider myself lucky.

  We were not excitably poor or evangelical, but we were striking for how little capacity any of us had to dream of a life outside the one we had. My mother collected Tweety Bird figurines. My dad was a facilities services manager for the convention center. We lived in a shingled bungalow-type residence in Anaheim.

  In 1985, my mother was driving by the Larry Fricker Company when it caught fire, sousing the air with methyl bromide. Not long after she developed a cough, followed by a cancer from which she died two months later. I was fifteen.

  It took time, but my dad acquired a second wife, which he still has. Mostly, though, he sits in a La-Z-Boy, wears a mouth guard, and watches TV, which pleasure is slain twice a week by epileptic spasms that have revoked his driver’s license and aptitude for work. For the money I spend on his care—that’s him grousing down the hall, by the way—I could have financed a cure for epilepsy, I’m sure. He and my stepmom have been living with me for years. They don’t ask questions about my life, and I venture nothing. It seems to have worked so far.

  I guess that’s not the story I meant to tell. But my dad’s calling, so I have to go. If I don’t have time to edit this thing, try to be kind when you air it later.

  “Thurlow! Answer me, son!” Wayne was seventy-nine, and since he couldn’t be bothered to move, he’d just yell for people across the house. His wife had the same habit. It drove Thurlow nuts. They’d yell for each other and for him, and now Wayne was just deaf enough to go ballistic when he couldn’t hear you, as though you were to blame. “Son!”

  He was actually using the intercom, which Thurlow had asked him not to do. But he did it just the same, because the more he called, the more apparent it would be that Thurlow had not come, that Thurlow was neglecting him, the son grown too big and famous to tend his old man.

  He headed for his father’s quarters. He had installed a keypad just in case Wayne had a seizure and couldn’t let him in, but mostly he endured the charade of being asked who was there and how could Wayne know for sure.

  He found his dad eating a peanut-butter-and-banana sandwich. Most of the hair on his head had fallen off years ago, which made inexplicable the flocks spilling from his ears and nose. Today he wore a turtleneck and sweater-vest twenty years old, and jeans that were cropped at the ankle. His sneakers were white and of no recognizable brand. Who knew why older men always seemed to buy no-name sneakers, but it was a phenomenon common to his kind. He offered Thurlow some sandwich.

  “Dad, what do you want? I’m having a busy day.”

  “Yes, yes, too busy for your old man, I heard that before.”

  Thurlow sat opposite his father and folded his hands on the table. They had never been the best of friends.

  “Son, I saw something on TV just now that has me wondering what the hell is happening to the world. Something about a kidnapping. Four people who work for the government, and poof! they’re snatched up by some fanatic who wants to change the world.”

  Thurlow sighed. His dad rarely took an interest in anything besides sports. He was so o
ut of touch, he seemed to think Thurlow had acquired wealth from a well-placed investment portfolio. It also helped that he was half-blind without his glasses and kept the TV on mute. Still, Thurlow made a note to disable his cable box.

  Wayne reached into his mouth to free a bit of peanut that had wedged under his denture plate.

  Thurlow began to lose patience. “Dad, what do you want?”

  Only Tyrone got in the way—Tyrone, who was his father’s bird. “Silly bird,” Wayne said, and he disappeared down the hall. It was times like these that Thurlow rued having made his dad’s quarter of the house so big.

  “Dad, I’m leaving.” But instead he followed Wayne until brought up short by Deborah, who was standing in the doorway to their bedroom. She wore a thin pink nightgown. Her curly white hair, generally stiff, was wilting down her face. She’d been married to Wayne for fifteen years and seemed to be the worse for it every time Thurlow saw her.

  “A visitor!” she said. “What’s the occasion?”

  Wayne reappeared with Tyrone on his shoulder.

  Thurlow blenched. He didn’t like animals, domestic or wild. He especially did not like this bird.

  Apparently, the feeling was mutual, since Tyrone, whose wings had been clipped, took one look at Thurlow and thudded to the floor. Then went under the bed.

  Wayne got on his knees. Thurlow looked at Deborah and asked for an umbrella. She looked at him, and the look was not nice.

  Wayne said, “Come on, Ty, everyone loves you, just come out.”

  Deborah said, “Wayne, please, you are being ridiculous. All you care about is this stupid bird.”

  They carried on this way for some minutes. Thurlow didn’t understand much about what was going on. It was true their repartee had always featured what rankled most, only this bravado felt new.