The Inner City

by Karen Heuler

  “We have a contract,” one man said testily. “Restoring land is someone else’s job.” Immediately, two of the large men moved towards him and placed their fingers on his shoulders.

  The man narrowed his eyes. “Get your hands off me,” he said. “I’m calling security.” He reached for his cell phone.

  “Take him away,” Roland said. Two of the large men grabbed him and they disappeared to the hallway. “Take them all away,” Roland added, and the businessmen jumped up, some arguing but many feeling that it was better to give in than to protest. Patricia felt a small qualm. She had assumed the large people were benign: were they? She sat down quickly in a vacated seat, her hands in her lap.

  “We’ll have lunch now,” Roland said, clearing the table of notepads and notebooks, of handouts and charts. The door opened and some of his cohorts entered with trays piled high with money of all denominations, as well as mayonnaise and salad dressings. Roland sat down with apparent pleasure, took a plate and fork and began to select bills and pile them on. “Help yourselves,” he said, and the other large people came in and sat down, leaning over for plates and food. “I prefer the twenties,” he said, glancing at Patricia. “Not as crisp as the fifties, not so soft as the singles.” His plate was now quite hefty with bills, and he poured Italian dressing on them, careful not to dribble over the sides. He sat back and began to eat, chewing vigorously and thoughtfully. “Eat up,” he said, motioning with his fork.

  Patricia reached out and took some of the hundreds—she would have to take something to be polite and these seemed cleaner. She chose blue cheese dressing and decided to roll up a bill with a wad of dressing in it and eat it like an hors d’oeuvre. It wasn’t bad; the dressing made it all that much easier. Eating money! she thought. Eating money! She was inordinately pleased.

  Roland and the large people ate quickly and quietly, their heads lowered, concentrating on the task at hand. When he was done, Roland put down his flatware, cleaned off his hands, and rose.

  “What about the rest of it?” Patricia asked, looking at the leftover money.

  “It will grow,” Roland said without interest. Ciceline came into the room, glanced around, and placed a small green ball on the platter of money, put her newspaper over it, then emptied a glass of water over the whole thing. Patricia followed them as they left. She glanced back; the stain from the green ball was spreading through the newspaper already. The fibers in the newspaper were starting to move.

  “Roland,” Patricia said. “I know I should have asked earlier, but I need to be clear. Are you going to harm anyone?”

  He stopped to look at her without emotion. “Yes,” he said. “This is a war.”

  She bowed her head. “Am I on the right side?” she asked quietly. She had always believed in being forthright and honest whenever possible.

  “How can there be a right side in war?” he asked reasonably. “It’s just that each side wants to live.”

  She wanted to live, too, brazenly. For a moment she doubted that she was doing the right thing, but her feet continued after Roland. She had watched the large people grow, so she was naturally attached to them. And she had always had a complex reaction to working in the city: some days she loathed it, some days it felt more real than her own life. It seemed to her that she had been, most of the time, on the road between the self she was in the city and the self she was outside it, between structure and order. She had stopped moving back and forth when she retired, but from that point on she had felt dull and compromised, arrested. With Roland she felt strong and certain and ahead of everyone else. It was, no doubt, not the thing to base a decision on, but she hadn’t felt this empowered in years. She would go with Roland.

  They met up with the others back on the street. The large people stood idly, not in rows, looking at a spot along the avenue. There, right on the corner, a small dry cleaner’s shop was absurdly lopsided, its back wall up in the air, its front wall tipping toward the street as a small crowd watched, quietly waiting behind yellow caution strips placed by the emergency squads.

  The building gave a small but obvious lurch.

  “That’s good,” Anselm said. “Almost there.” They began to walk slowly towards the store, and people moved out of their way if they saw them, with a look of surprise on their faces.

  A cop watched them carefully, then came over and spoke to Roland. “Heard a report,” he said. “Of some big people—pardon me, not a judgement—disrupting a meeting.” He looked at Roland. “That’s what dispatch said. Disrupting a meeting. Would that be you?”

  Roland nodded. “Shareholders,” he said. “Stock disagreement.”

  “Thought so,” the officer said. “As far as I know, those stocks are outside the law anyway. Just checking.” He nodded and moved towards the shifting building, calling out, “Just get back now, behind the line. Never saw a building collapse before? What are you, from out of town?”

  The dry cleaner’s, Patricia could now see, rested on a pale green slab of some kind. She craned her neck forward and Anselm, noticing her difficulty, pushed aside everyone in front of her so she could see it unobstructed. It was the colour of new spring growth, and it perfectly filled the lot the dry cleaner’s store stood on. There was a sound of breaking glass and a groan from the roof of the cleaner’s, echoed by a groan of excitement from the bystanders. “Move back! Move back!” the police cried, and it was just in time, for the building suddenly heaved up a few more inches and toppled bulkily into the street.

  The green shelf below it had sprouted up a foot or so. Anselm had a smile on his face. “Is that a plant?” Patricia asked. She had an urge to touch it but the police blocked the way.

  Anselm’s smile increased. “An office plant,” he said. “Evergreen.”

  She liked the mass and decisiveness of the large people, as anyone would who had always been seen as irrelevant; she liked how they brought with them a sense of turnover and vitality and a lack of cant. They would not pretend they were good for the economy or good for the average man or woman, she thought; they would not have secret accounts or back room deals or documents that covered their lies with tired, boring, overworked words. There was a little bit of outlaw about them, and a little bit of saviour. She had to talk to herself for a moment to admit that it was the outlaw part that appealed the most, and she was too old for outlawry—or so she had thought.

  Roland moved off and some of the large people went with him, moving down side streets to the back of some commercial buildings. They walked slowly, looking at surfaces and signs. Ciceline bent down to look at a browned bush and some browned weeds; she turned, walked back a few yards, and knocked over a fire hydrant to water them.

  Farther on they caught up to some of the ones who had broken off from the group earlier. The man in casual dress—the one who wore a sports jacket rather than a suit—faced the side of a grooved, white stone building, his body right smack up against the ridges, so tight that Patricia thought it must be painful. His arms were splayed out, his fingers in the channels around each stone. Those fingers, she saw, were very long, stretching along the ridges—even as she watched they stretched further, inching along and, she thought, catching in the small textures of the material. Yes, adhering. His fingers were turning into vines. His body pressed and flattened into the building, his face tightened into a pale sunflower, his suit changed into leaves, his trunk into a stalk, even as she watched, so that she had to squint to see what was left of him, still hidden behind the growth. A shoot rose from the top of his head, sliding up to the second-floor windows.

  Anselm saw her gaze. “He’ll make his way in, under the concrete, into the beams, around the windows and into the walls. As they walk around, sure that the floors are solid, he’ll be licking at the materials, putting out a leaf or a pointed tendril.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “Water and sun?” she asked.

  “He’ll find water easily; there are pipes and sinks. And the windows—windows will find the sun for him.”


  Her mind became filled with the image of the plant spreading and pushing its way through the walls, the floors, its relentless small separations loosening a bolt, a beam. “It will bring the building down,” she said.

  “Everything comes down eventually,” he replied.

  “No one will know about it. In time.”

  “That’s the problem with time. There’s never enough time in the present to know the present. We keep growing.”

  “Someone could get hurt.”

  “Someone always gets hurt. It’s the fault of time, which always pushes to the end. Doesn’t it? Always to the end.”

  She winced, suddenly aware of her own push to the end. She tucked in the edges of her own thinking, to compensate. Nature always took the long view, and the long view had no sorrow. Personally, she didn’t like sorrow either.

  They were heading out of town again, back, she supposed, to the area where they had originally grown. Was it over? she wondered with faint despair. She had hoped for so much more.

  They passed a gas station, where two of the large people stepped away from the group. Patricia saw a large woman plant a bamboo-like stalk next to a drainpipe; she saw a large man leave his newspaper against a pump. But there was no confrontation; and she was disappointed. Were the thrills of the day already done?

  The remaining large people moved off a side road that Patricia knew led towards the town dump. When they reached it, they all spread out and she lost sight of Roland. She saw Anselm skirt around the edge of the pit and followed him into the hardscrabble brush around it. She found him bent over a black bag of garbage, pushing it gently, scraping away at the packed soil around it.

  “Anselm?” she asked gently, and he looked at her and nodded. She came up and leaned over the garbage, but as she studied it, she saw that it had a root. She said, “It’s a plant?” and he answered, “It’s a new kind of plant.” She pushed at it and it yielded slightly, as a heavy bag of garbage would do. “But why?” she asked finally.

  “They won’t notice it,” he said.

  Anselm tapped the plant gently, even (Patricia thought) affectionately. “Have you planted a lot?” she asked. She looked at him, cocking her head. Had he worn a hat? Had his hair been longer? What had happened to the coffee cup and newspapers he’d held? She looked away, viewing the landfill, looking not into the pit but along the sides, where here and there the large people moved and stopped, sowing seeds, leaving roots. She liked the idea of the rest of them leaving traces of full-force green in among the rust and oilcans, among the cardboard boxes and plastic bottles.

  Anselm was looking at her. “Our time is almost over.”

  “You mean for today?” she asked fearfully. The idea that tomorrow would come and go without them was ferociously sad.

  “Yes, today is over for us,” he said, and she appreciated the delicacy of his answer. It didn’t sound like he regretted it; it sounded like the day was enough for him, a concept that made Patricia shiver. The large people met up again, and she noted that they looked a little frayed, and that various items of theirs were gone. The hats, for instance, and the newspapers and coffee cups, and a handkerchief poking out of a pocket.

  The sun hung low in the sky as they gathered on a spot beyond the garbage dump, listening to the keening of the seagulls swirling in the air. Roland was missing; it was Anselm and Ciceline and a few others. They moved languidly away from the dump to a small stand of trees. There they stood until one by one they sat down or leaned against a tree trunk. Patricia sat with them as the sunset bleached the sky. They were no longer large; they had lost bulk and seemed to shrivel in front of her. She saw their bodies relax and their hands grow still. Once they were completely settled, their arms and features arranged, and their eyes shut, Patricia watched over them until the sunset and the moon began to rise. By then, their figures were dim and slumped, and she decided she didn’t want to watch them as they slid back into the earth. But she did want something of theirs to take forward, so she bent and plucked off the buttons on their shirts and jackets. By midnight they were thin as leaves upon the ground, and she left.

  The next day she went back to where she had first found them and planted buttons in the ground, got mulch and spread it around, and began to grow herbs around and between them, hoping that soon there would be another crop. People passing by noted her efforts, and the small shapes of flowers and herbs on the set of the hill, and thought nothing of it, for old women like to tend their gardens; what else is there for them to do as time advances and nature takes its course?

  AFTER IMAGES

  A survey I conducted on Water Street concludes that 58 percent of Americans think it is probably 58 degrees out, while 22 think it is probably 54, and the remainder aren’t sure.

  For the first time in weather history this month, the percentage of people thinking it is 58 degrees is exactly 58. This happens, we are told, on average of once every six months. You won’t see that happening again until probably late fall or early winter, although polls also show that a majority of people think there won’t be any winter next year at all.

  That was the gist of my segment on last night’s news. Today I got called into the office. “We’re getting complaints,” the news manager said. He’s a fat man and one ear is lower than the other, giving him a quizzical look. “People say your segments are insulting.”

  “How many people said that? Maybe they’re just the kind of people who complain. You have to ask the people who don’t complain what they think.”

  “No, I don’t,” the manager said. “I don’t have to do anything.”

  “Poor choice of words,” I conceded. “I merely meant: balance. We strive for balance.”

  “No, we don’t,” the manager said.

  “What do you want, sir?” I asked humbly.

  “Relevance. Nobody wants a poll on what the temperature might be. They want to know what the temperature is, and move on to sports.”

  I bowed my head.

  And by the way, how accurate are the polls? We asked 40 people and 20 said not accurate and 20 said accurate. Which means, according to our off-screen analyst, that any survey, tally, census, or sampling of the public would itself be only half-accurate, since the public is divided in the concept of accuracy itself and is therefore unreliable.

  But is this really so? We asked a former employee of Burton & Pudge Poll Company, which compiles statistics on the surveys themselves, how surveys are measured. This employee, who prefers to remain anonymous, says that polls in general get three different results if the interviewee is asked the same question in three different ways. In response, Burton & Pudge representatives stated that this in itself points out the refinements of the polling process itself, which recognizes that only 30 percent of respondents hear all the words in a sentence, a figure that has been verified by having test subjects write down all the words in a sentence in reverse order so as to eliminate rote repetition. Ten percent do not write down the word “not” in a sentence that contains it.

  On the other hand, 13 percent put it in when it wasn’t there to begin with.

  This is how the polling industry comes up with the plus-or-minus 3 percent variance, since misunderstandings on either side of the scale are 3 percent away from cancelling themselves out.

  I was invited to the office again. The manager said, “That was not what we had in mind. Polls should be fun. If they can’t be fun, what’s the point of it?”

  I considered that, and thought that was a very good observation.

  According to research by Wallup and Pye Interview Associates, facial expression is more accurate than verbal expression, at least when the face itself is aware it is lying. Most times it is not lying and then all we want to know is: does a flat face like what we’re saying or not? That’s simple enough.

  Sticking one’s tongue out is a no; smiling is a yes, unless the eyes are squinting, in which case it’s no again. A shake of the head, no; a nod, yes. But beyond that—what is the nose saying? (Flar
ing, sniffing, snorting?) We have also calibrated the ears, since some people, sociopaths especially, confine their telling expressions to the earlobe. They may pass all the tests checking the muscles of the lips, the eyebrows, the eyelids, the nostril, but the ear tightens and the lobe clenches. That is a lie.

  “The ear?” the co-anchor said, suspiciously.

  We can also track your voice, you know; we can tell the truth of what you’re saying.

  “The ear?” he repeated. “I don’t believe the ear even has muscles.”

  “I don’t care about that, really. Maybe it’s the cartilage that quivers.”

  Ha.

  He waved me off, also a telling gesture, but a little blunt. It takes no special education to understand that.

  I turned to address him, sharing my airtime. “Did you know the way you dress also reveals a lot? And I don’t mean, do you have style, do you have money. I mean, this is a person who has no imagination, this is a person who fantasizes. Okay, you say, that’s easy. But I must add, when you lie, your clothes don’t fit as well. Unless you stay absolutely still, and that’s a dead giveaway. A person who doesn’t shift around during interrogation is a person hiding something.”

  “Interrogation?”

  “Well yes, what did you think I was talking about?”

  His eyes narrowed. He slowly put his hand in his pocket. As if he had something, yes. He thought he had an instrument that could deflect me. His nostrils flared.

  His ear twitched.

  I was getting the hang of being called into the office. I hung my head immediately and said, “Boss, what should I do?”

  “You have to know what the public wants,” he said. “You have to have the knack for it. What is it that gets our goat? Scandal, crime, the all-chocolate diet. Death and taxes, they get everyone interested. Do something on taxes.”

  I’m not interested in taxes.

  The final test of any poll of course is what the dead say about dying. That’s the poll we want and never get. The dead, as far as polls are concerned, have nothing to say about death once the body freezes up, but right after death, especially that moment we like to call “instantaneous death,” we find it is still possible to get a few questions in.