by Alon Preiss
At 12:15, Daniel buzzed the file room to ask for the file on the Edward Bear Landfill. He was told it had been misplaced.
“Find it,” he said. “It’s one of our most important cases.”
“What can I tell ya, man?” a file clerk replied. At the time, Daniel was unaware of a developing drama in the file room:
That morning, one of the file clerks, a high-school drop-out in his mid-twenties with crazy eyes and a subversively polite manner, called the personnel office and said he would not be at work that day. “I was on the subway,” he explained to the head of personnel, “and I tried to pass a little gas. I honestly thought I would just be passing a little gas.
“But it was more than just gas,” he told the horrified middle-manager, and he realized an instant later that he was in no condition to go straight to work. He went back home to wash his pants, but now he still couldn’t go to work, he explained. His pants were all wet and the blow-dryer was doing no good at all.
The head of personnel typed an entirely sincere memo to Margaret Spencer, the office manager, in which she stated that “having a person working in our file room who cannot help but soil himself is not in itself a bad thing. Having a person in our file room who admits to having soiled himself is quite another matter. And having a person in the file room who explains how he went about soiling himself to an office administrator is entirely inappropriate.” She concluded that two of the primary requirements of working in a respectable Wall Street office were never to admit that one had soiled oneself and rarely if ever to allow one’s gas to become a matter of concern to others.
Ms. Spencer, a terribly correct middle-aged woman, dutifully sent the memorandum to the managing partner, who Xeroxed it and brought it up in the next partner’s meeting as a bit of comic relief. No action was taken, of course (the partners were not interested in any waste dumps covering less than an acre), but the memo was surreptitiously passed to most of the New York employees, as well as many of the employees in the firm’s California offices, and it was even translated into French and distributed to the European fixed income deal group in Paris. In fact, the young file clerk himself was one of the few employees who never saw the memo, and he would never recognize the secret smiles behind the familiar office babble; and until his dying day he would remain ignorant of the devastating humiliation he had suffered that year.
But all that, including the file clerk’s death sixty years later from meningitis, was yet to come. At this point in our story, the young clerk was returning to the Bronx to clean his soiled trousers, and Daniel was in his office, reading through the documents supplied by Edward Bear. He picked up one of the magazines and tossed it carelessly on the pile beside his desk. Two slightly yellowed, stapled pieces of paper slid out. He picked them up and his eyes fell on one startling, incriminating sentence, typed years ago, capitalized and underlined. DESTROY THIS MEMORANDUM AFTER YOU HAVE READ IT. FOR YOUR EYES ONLY.
A very nervous executive had written to the president of the company, strenuously objecting to the “Plastic People scheme.” Daniel felt his heart sink. He did not want to read on. Why had the president of the company not destroyed this as he had been requested? How had it wound up inside a company magazine intended for production to the EPA? The memo-writer, a man named Cliff Patrickson, explained that it was due only to his great loyalty to Edward Bear that he was writing this memo. “I have chosen to write this down because I feel that I cannot be articulate in discussing this in your presence.” He had at first not believed the whispers. He had, after all, often sent telexes to Plastic People, and had received telexes in return from Mr. Hughes and Mr. Smith. But he’d heard the same rumor from several different people. Plastic People was a dummy company set up to deflect any possible litigation or even unforeseeable federal penalties away from Edward Bear. “If contractual liability should ever attach to any party or individual based on narrowly legal activities that I don’t have the patience to detail here, it cannot affect Edward Bear, which has been uninvolved. The fictional Messieurs Hughes and Smith – cleverly common names – will vanish. The unincorporated, fly-by-night Plastic People company will pack its bags. Subpoenas will be useless. We will be free and clear.” Mr. Patrickson had examined the books; for years, receipts attributed to legitimate business had been exaggerated, apparently, he deduced, to cover up profits paid to Plastic People that had been funneled back into Edward Bear. He implored the president to put a halt to this practice, to close up Plastic People immediately and deal directly with their customers. It had been so easy to figure out. In just a few weeks, he had uncovered the fraud. Could not a potential legal opponent be as clever?
“Again,” he concluded, “please make sure to destroy this memorandum.”
The universe flipped inside out; the moon somersaulted across the night sky; the stars blew out, and darkness settled across his brain.
Daniel sat behind his desk, staring at the blue type on yellowing paper which, thanks to the cursed Mr. Patrickson, and the even more cursed former president of Edward Bear, spelled the end of the Edward Bear litigation, of Johnson & Tierney’s efforts to make a name for themselves in the field of environmental law, and of Daniel’s efforts at partnership, which had been tied almost exclusively to his efforts on behalf of Edward Bear. These guys had been polluting the world for years and trying to cover their tracks so heavy-handedly. Yet if not for these two pieces of paper, Daniel would never have known, the EPA would never have known, and the courts would never have known. If not for these two highly destructible pieces of typewriter paper. Daniel put his head in his hands. He was so tired that he couldn’t even think straight; exhaustion seeped through his body, and he felt tears coming to his eyes, which he carefully suppressed. Once the news reached the EPA, undoubtedly the Internal Revenue Service would see fit to get involved. These two pieces of typewriter paper – these yellowed, wilted, frayed pieces of damned typewriter paper – were his life. Everything came down to this.
A tap on the door, Daniel glanced up, his face red. He inconspicuously tossed the memo in his lower left-hand desk drawer. David Rutherford was at the door with a man in a new haircut and new suit. “Paul Clancy,” David said. “Wants to be a summer associate here, for some reason. Interested in environmental law. Got a minute?”
Daniel said sure, and Paul Clancy was plunked down in front of Daniel’s desk, where he discussed his previous experiences with waste and ooze for what seemed like hours. Daniel lit a cigarette and watched Paul Clancy’s eyes water. Daniel tried to think of something to say to lighten the moment. But nothing came to mind.
Clancy was trying to act confident, but he came off as arrogant, and Daniel stared at the ashes on the end of his cigarette and faded off into a flashback, just as though he were on TV, and the scene began to fade, fog drifted in, time flew backwards, erasing the past year as though it had never happened. Many times, Henry had sat in that very seat. Henry would have known what to do: destroy the memo and keep his mouth shut, or call his client and excoriate him ruthlessly, then send all the documents to the EPA and wait for the consequences. Henry, sitting right there in that chair, would have had the perfect advice. Sitting right where Clancy now sat, this little Clancy-man, trying to impress Daniel, trying to present himself favorably but humbly. This was a continuing cycle of life, wasn’t it? A few years ago, he’d been born into this firm expressing the same mixture of corporate idealism and self-confidence, and a few years from now, perhaps, Paul Clancy would be sitting here in this very office, wondering what he was supposed to have accomplished with his life, and Daniel would be in Henry’s office, hungering for partnership, drinking seltzer, oblivious of his impending death. We never get a chance to say goodbye, Margaret Spencer had told him. You know that.
“So I gather you’re very interested in toxic waste,” Daniel said.
“It will determine the course of America into the ’90s and beyond,” Paul Clancy replied. Daniel pointed out that most of the lawyers, or perhaps all of the lawyer
s, here at Johnson & Tierney didn’t really care about toxic waste at all, except as it related to the success of the firm, and, by logical extension, to their own net worth. The corporate equivalent of hunting and gathering, basically. “You know,” Daniel said, “environmental law always sounds nice when you say it. ‘I do environmental law.’ It sounds as though you have some interest in the environment. But we defend polluters. We don’t care about the environment. ‘We defend polluters.’ That’s what we should say.”
“But attorneys for the polluters are also involved in problem-solving,” Clancy said. “I’m sure you see yourself as working towards a just and equitable solution in which the environment is protected and business is not unfairly burdened ...”
Daniel shook his head. “We’re not trying to solve the problems of the environment,” he said. “We’re trying to protect polluters. If we could get them all off the hook on technicalities and expand our client base, we’d do it. The world be damned. If we could completely destroy America, we’d do it. Perhaps a committed man such as yourself would not be happy here.”
Paul retreated.
“Of course,” he said, “the success of the firm takes priority over the future of America. You must have misunderstood me.” He blushed.
At 2 o’clock, Daniel decided that he needed a break. He told Dolores he had a doctor’s appointment and wandered through the hallways to the front door. Inside some office, an attorney was shouting at his secretary: “No! No! That’s not what I said! This is entirely wrong!” Daniel took the elevator to the ground floor then dashed off into the darkening afternoon. He hailed a taxi in the rain and rode to Natalie’s studio in Tribeca. He stared out the window as the taxi sloshed through the downpour; he felt nervous and slightly desperate, just as he had all those months ago when he’d shown up with flowers to beg and cajole her to return.
“I just keep thinking,” Susan told him as they walked along the street, the night they met, “that something or someone will rescue me suddenly. You know, save me from – whatever I need saving from. None of us is so happy that we don’t need some saving.” They were walking to her apartment. An old woman stood on the corner, feeding pigeons, who surrounded her like a swarm of bees. One landed on her back, and tried to keep its balance, wings fluttering; from Susan’s perspective, the skinny old woman looked like an angel, down on her luck, with tattered clothes and her own set of dirty pigeon wings.
“Not me,” Daniel replied, a bit too insistently. “Hopeless pessimist, atheist ... everything bad. Everything President Reagan has spent his whole life fighting against, that’s me. Except homosexual. Not a homosexual. But otherwise, I’m unchangeable, utterly unsavable.”
Susan broke away from his gaze, as though she were keeping something to herself.
“If I’m trampling on some deeply held sense of – ”
“No,” she said, still not looking directly at him. “We all carry things around with us. Things we don’t understand. You don’t know what’s made you this way.”
“A year of strict training in Orthodox Judaism,” Daniel said.
“Which proved to you that life has no meaning? A few jerky rabbis? Were you that impressionable? And you’ve had no occasion to reevaluate your views in the last 30 years?”
“No time.” The last 30 years, he explained, had been a swirl of motion, incomprehensible, and now all but forgotten. Had time slowed down tonight, on the street outside Susan’s apartment? Was this a night he would actually remember?
“If there is a G-d,” little Daniel asked the rabbi, “then how can one account for all the pain and suffering in the world?”
This was not a sudden insight, a bit of inspired apostasy. Daniel had not discovered Baruch Spinoza. He was reading from the assigned day school textbook, and the rabbi would undoubtedly have an uninspiring answer. The classroom was dusty and gray; the rabbi was dusty and gray.
“Thank you, Daniel. It is impossible for Man to understand the Will of Hashem. Just as a doctor may say, ‘Oh, you know. We’ll have to open you up. Take out, oh, I don’t know. This organ right here. This will hurt. But it is for your own good.’ The spleen, perhaps, or whatnot. If you were to ask, ‘Oh, please, doctor. Tell me why you are taking out that organ there, perhaps my spleen,’ the doctor would not be able to answer the question for you, because it would be outside of your sphere of understanding. How can you understand the spleen? You are not a doctor, and so you cannot understand the spleen, or the reasoning behind the calculus requiring its removal. Ahah! You see?”
Daniel nodded because what-the-Hell? He didn’t want to be kept after school, and the rabbi would not see reason, no matter how hard he were to try, so why try? But the rabbi’s analogy was all wrong: in Daniel’s experience, doctors explained everything. Doctors did not even take blood without explaining why. If a doctor wished to take out an organ, little Daniel’s spleen, even at this tender age Daniel thought he would be entitled to an explanation. He knew that one should always ask for a second opinion, especially where organ removal were concerned. If G-d were all-Goodness, why could G-d not explain why he had created smallpox? And if Man were too foolish to understand, why had G-d not made Man smarter? “Perhaps,” the rabbi now said, “Hashem creates pain in our lives – hacks off our limbs in accidents, kills babies in fires, and so on and so forth and whatnot – to test our faith. Ahah!” He raised one very very long finger in the air. Daniel nodded. When something good happens to us, it proves that G-d is rewarding us. If something bad happens to us, He is either testing our faith or doing something else that is so sublime that we could not possibly understand it. Therefore anything that happens, good or bad, is proof of His existence. Concluding that sometimes bad things happen and sometimes good things happen because of random chance would have been too logical and simple for this idiot-rabbi, Daniel supposed. If Daniel were talking to his intellectual equal, rather than a rabbi, he would have asked why he should bother to have faith in an all-knowing entity who murders babies in fires (and whatnot) to test our faith. What good is having faith in Someone who treats us like that? Why bother to be good if G-d hacks off our limbs anyway, murders people in terrible and painful ways, just to see if we’ll still love Him, like the most insecure and immature child? Why bother to pray to Someone who could not be bothered to lift a finger to answer the prayers that I pray? Either (1) Hashem doesn’t exist, (2) He is powerless, or (3) He is an asshole, and in any of these three eventualities, why should I praise Him or even bother with Him? But instead of asking these questions, Daniel nodded, and he told the rabbi that he understood. There was no point in trying to reason with such people.
(In college Daniel composed a song about this spiritual crisis. The professor responded, “Are you being ironic? That is, are you actually trying to point out the inconsistencies in religious faith, or are you satirizing those who would do so? In other words, is this the 16th century? Or are you five years old? B minus.”)
Staring out the window of the cab on the way to Natalie’s studio, plastics dancing in his imagination, he thought to himself, I need to be saved. Save me, someone.
Natalie didn’t answer the buzzer, so Daniel let himself in. He was pleased to note that Natalie actually had been working. Dash all thoughts of Alec’s return. One large, half-completed canvas retained Natalie’s usual long-shots of destruction, yet added a montage of genuine human agony, close-ups that seemed to harken back to The Scream and Guernica. If this were her breakthrough, then perhaps Natalie had really missed the point of what Daniel thought her paintings had been saying about the depersonalization and banalization of human catastrophe in the postWar world.
The buzzer sounded; it was a delivery man for a Chinese restaurant. Daniel let the fellow in, paid for the meal and waited a while longer. Natalie finally showed up half an hour after the food arrived. She was out of breath and her cheeks were flushed. Daniel asked where she had been and she replied that she hadn’t known he was coming.
“But where were you?” he a
sked.
“Why?” she asked. “I just needed to get out for a while.”
“I just think it’s odd,” Daniel said, “that you leave the studio right after you’ve ordered food delivered.”
“I’d have picked it up myself if I’d missed the delivery.” She stared back at him quizzically. “It seems to make you angry. Ten years ago, it wouldn’t have.”
“It doesn’t make me angry,” he said, sighing. “I’m just tired.” He smiled, weakly. “Could I have a little wine?” he asked. “I need to talk with you about something.” He called after her as she walked to the kitchen. “And join me, too, OK?”
She came back a moment later with a bottle and two glasses, poured some for herself and took a sip before passing the wine to Daniel.
“I miss Henry,” he said. “Terribly. But I don’t know why I should. In fact, I think that I shouldn’t.”
She shook her head. “You don’t really miss him, Daniel. And you think that you should. Because if you don’t, then no one will miss him. And someone should. Shouldn’t everyone be remembered by someone?”
Daniel glanced at the floor, stammering a bit; his face was that of a man about to leap into a void, and not sure where he will land.
Daniel began.
15 billion years ago there is an egg, a cosmic egg, the primeval atom, and within this extraordinary egg are all the components of existence, of everything that will or might one day exist. The egg is very very small, but it is all there is, so there’s no way of knowing that it’s small, and it sits around for a while, waiting for something to happen, waiting for a universe to spring into existence. The Egg is everything, and nothing is real, nothing exists, not even the egg really; not even Time, because Time will be an invention of the Universe, our Universe, and without our Universe, there can be no Time. One day – although it isn’t really a “day” – the nothingness blows up into somethingness, inexplicably and powerfully, with such a force that everything that suddenly becomes will continue to fly outward from the explosion for billions of years or more. Matter, dust, gas, protons, neutrons, fly through Space as though Space has always existed, and the dust and the gas flying through the space are drawn toward each other – call it “Love,” call it “Gravity”, for perhaps both formed instantly in the explosion – but it’s a powerful attraction, and over the course of millions of years the attraction grows so strong that nuclear fusion occurs, and the Sun springs into being, heating a pile of clumpy matter that has somehow found a home circling this gas sphere, and for a few billion years rocks melt and lava flows and then, one day – and this time, it really is a “day” – conditions are just right in the Primordial Soup, as this well-heated mass of clumpy matter will come to be known, for Life to spring into being as mysteriously as the Universe itself. And this one-celled being can’t know or understand that it’s a miraculous creature; that it is, perhaps, the only living thing, ever, anywhere.