A Flash of Blue Sky

by Alon Preiss

  “A very big scoop.” Emmett sighed. “I’m not just going to drop this. I’ll find out everything that I can.”

  “Of course you will,” Irina said. Then: “Let me show you something that was on sale at the store.” She fished around in her purse. “It was on sale, but I stole it. No one noticed.” She pulled out a small copy of Kalil Gibran’s The Prophet, in a cheesy cover from the early 1970s. “He’s one of the world’s most famous philosophers. Everything he says is wrong.”

  She turned to page 28.

  “Read it,” she told Emmett.

  He looked at the crumbly yellow page.

  He began to read aloud.

  The long-dead Lebanese poet, whose words Emmett now recited, was glorifying work in a long, heartfelt ode; he wrote that a man at work was like a flute and one with God, “intimate with life’s innermost secret”; the dead watch and love us when we work.

  “Work,” Emmett read with a little cringe, “is love made visible.”

  Emmett finished reading the poem.

  They blinked at each other in silence.

  “That is so stupid,” said Irina said after a while. “Poetry has nothing to do with life. I think he is wrong.”

  Emmett nodded. “I do too.”

  *

  And Daniel would have agreed, had he been asked. To Daniel, work meant being covered by an oily second skin of fluorescent sweat; it meant being covered by the same sort of sweat every day, week after week, year after year. And so weeks passed, and he barely noticed. As Emmett and Irina’s lives changed drastically – irreversibly? – Daniel’s remained exactly the same. The surroundings of his life changed slightly to be sure (a new president, some new clothes, new carpeting) but Daniel remained exactly the same. One Wednesday, several weeks after Emmett’s conversation with Irina on the park bench, Daniel spent the morning on the telephone with clients. By 11:30, it was time for a trip to the men’s room. In the afternoon, he prepped a witness for the opening days of a big securities fraud trial on which he’d been assigned to work after Thomas Stothard’s sudden departure from the firm to go in-house at a big investment bank. The trial was scheduled to begin in two months, but destined to settle. He worked on a partner’s oral argument. At 7:30, he went into the case room for an international intellectual property action, helped a first-year associate prepare documents for production to the plaintiffs. Then he grabbed a quick meal in the firm’s cafeteria, went back to his office and worked on Edward Bear’s reply brief in its motion for summary judgment, hoping against all odds that the court might summarily condemn the Environmental Protection Agency for its shocking harassment of an esteemed toxic polluter like the Bear. At one in the morning, he took a break and went into the case room to discover that the third-year associate he’d entrusted to defend an environmental deposition the very next day had somehow made a mess of the documents. He and Daniel sat together until five am sorting and bickering. “You’re supposed to understand these documents by morning,” Daniel said. “Look, this is Edward Bear’s top engineer during the 1960s. This is no small matter. You’ve got to know all the facts, stay on your toes, don’t give an inch.”

  The associate shrugged, his eyes drooping.

  “I know you’re tired, you little son-of-a-bitch,” Daniel said, “but if you keep fucking up like this, you’re not going to last long around here.”

  “Good,” the associate said.

  At five am, Daniel retreated to his office to dictate a memo to Percy, summarizing the actions his firm recommended for the coming weeks. At 5:30, he found himself running about, slamming his head violently into the walls. Then came a short span of time, around forty-five minutes, during which he blacked out. The next thing he knew he was sitting at his desk, blood dripping into his eyes. He walked to the men’s room, examined himself in the mirror, determined that the bloody gash just above his hairline would not require stitches. He doused it in cold water, combed his hair over the developing scab. On the way back to his office, he passed the firm’s state law technocrat, a bald, humorless sixty year old man, sitting at his desk in the middle of the night, mining so many feet of blue sky, as the fellow once said, so long ago, coining a baffling idiom that wouldn’t die. Blue sky lawyer, the term for these dry drafters of 50-state filings, evoked sunshine and mint, while the reality was dust and darkness. Daniel lingered for a moment, and the tired, humorless man looked up and waved. Daniel waved back, then he returned to his office, where he tinkered with his reply brief until eight am. Then he took a cab back to his apartment to shower, shave, and ready himself for the day ahead.

  The day just dawning would be different; it was the one day of the year that was always a little different. This was the day of the firm “outing,” a trip to an all-white country club somewhere in Connecticut, with a sprawling golf course, swimming, fishing, tennis – all those things at which Daniel’s skills would be found wanting by virtue of his childhood in New York City. The partners at Johnson & Tierney had grown up around all of this. Daniel was invariably relegated to the shadows, watching them swing their golf clubs, curse when they went below par, or above par, or whatever. Every year, he wound up drinking port and smoking cigars in an armchair, surrounded by colleagues with an equally clumsy disposition.

  So before returning to work, he dressed in that idiotically sporty outfit – dark blue blazer, tan slacks, light blue button-down shirt – that he reserved exclusively for outings at racially restricted country clubs in Connecticut.

  Daniel took a cab to his office at 10:00 am, hopped on a bus chartered by the firm just a moment before the doors swung shut, sat down next to some fat guy who looked only slightly familiar. With 450 attorneys in the firm, there were very few whom Daniel knew by name. He felt all right, quietly keeping to himself while the bus blazed along the interstate. But half an hour later, when the bus exited the highway and vanished into a thick forest, branches pounding on the roof, Daniel felt confined, claustrophobic. He always hated this moment, when the city suddenly vanished and nature took over. At the sprawling country club, he spent an hour or so indoors, smoking cigars with a couple of partners, who said they’d been hearing good things about his work on the United Chemicals and Gasoline litigation, and Daniel thanked them appreciatively. He even agreed to play golf with two of them, but he lasted only half a game before sudden stomach paroxysms sent him to the men’s room for an hour. When he reemerged, painful humiliation over his collapse and subsequent silly walk across the golf course kept him from rejoining the game. Any professional points he might have won had since been forfeited.

  Still in a bit of pain, he went into a sitting room, announced that he needed to make a call. A dapper old man wheeled a telephone into the room, and Daniel began to dial. Once the ringing began, he immediately forgot who he was trying to call As the phone on the other end of the line rang and rang, Daniel racked his brain for clues. At last he heard a click, and a sleepy woman’s voice said “Hello.” Daniel replied, “Hello,” as politely as he could. “Daniel?” the voice exclaimed, and Daniel gasped with shock. “Susan?” he asked.

  “How did you get my number?”

  He looked around the room, feeling trapped. “I don’t know,” he said. “I asked for a phone, this guy brought me a phone, I dialed, I forgot who I was calling, then you answered .... Then I didn’t know who you were, then finally I recognized your voice.” Good bluff, he thought.

  She laughed, and she couldn’t stop. “Daniel, how many years has it been? Eighty? Are you senile?”

  He laughed with her, embarrassed but gratified at her amusement. “I've gone completely senile, just now,” he said. “Five minutes ago I was fine. Something I ate, I suppose.” Then: “Susan, where are you now?”

  “San Francisco,” she said. “You must have known that. You dialed the San Francisco area code. Don’t you remember?”

  He paused, and complete silence ensued. Finally, Susan laughed again. “Daniel, come back! Where have you gone?”

  “Wait a second,
” he said softly. “I think I know why I was calling. I’m going to be in California for a meeting with a client in a few weeks. I must have heard you were in California and so I was calling to see if I could swing by and visit you after it’s all over.” He snapped his fingers. “Ahah! I saw Rachel a little while ago. She must have told me that you were in San Francisco. She must have given me your phone number.” He hunted in his pockets for the scrap of paper he had written Susan’s number on, but he couldn’t find it. “I must have memorized your number and thrown it away so that my wife wouldn’t find it and get pissed off. And I must have decided that it would be a good idea to call you now.” He sighed. Mystery solved.

  As sunset fell, the men gradually retired to the locker room, where they changed into tuxedos. When Daniel returned to the dining room, his wife was standing nervously at one entrance, scanning the room. He waved. She smiled and waved back.

  At dinner, Daniel and Natalie sat with a tax partner and a very senior “of counsel,” who muttered gentle, inaudible asides from across the table. Benjamin, the nervous summer associate, sat to Daniel’s left. “Not going to be home too much,” Daniel said in a loud voice to Natalie. “Got to show Ben the town, sell him on the firm.” He turned to Benjamin. “Only city in the world where you can see Cats! and Les Miz in the same day, you know.”

  After dinner, Daniel and Natalie danced the fox-trot to some Big Band tune by the Artie Shaw orchestra, and sat down at the very edge of the dance floor at a little table with three chairs. Natalie drank some big, colorful drink, Daniel drank a vodka. Natalie seemed to have caught someone’s eye, and Daniel turned to look – too late! – it was Mr. Tierney, who made his way, slowly but surely, to their table.

  “We cannot run,” Daniel whispered. “This guy is known to fire people for nothing. He fires you right away, takes you to your office, makes sure you clean out your desk, because he forgets things very easily and he knows it. Don’t mention politics, it unhinges him. Don’t disagree with him about anything. Laugh at his jokes, even if you don’t know what he’s talking about. He always makes these little jokes that aren’t funny. Oh, shit, why me? He’s like that kid on The Twilight Zone, with all-encompassing power and no superego."

  Natalie took mental notes. “I hate to see you like this.”

  “Hush.”

  Mr. Tierney was now very close, hunched over in his perfectly tailored suit. He was in his nineties, he could barely hear, and his voice boomed uncomfortably, and he could barely think, but he could walk around, and that was something. His skin was so deeply lined that it was difficult even to look at him, and mounds of flab jiggled about on his face when he spoke.

  “Well! well! well!” he boomed, loudly enough for the entire room to hear. “Lucky I caught the 4:10 to Cleveland, eh?” He smiled. Daniel and Natalie laughed appreciatively. “No shoe-shine on the 4:10 to Cleveland, you know!” the partner exclaimed with a great guffaw, and Daniel and Natalie burst into even more enthusiastic explosions of laughter.

  “Good to see you!” Daniel exclaimed. “Please sit down!” Please refuse, Daniel thought, beaming vibes at Mr. Tierney. Please, please refuse.

  “Thank you, Theo!” the old man bellowed, and he settled unsteadily into the third chair. Daniel could feel the entire room silently laughing at him.

  The three of them spoke for a while about the outing, about golf, about tennis, which Mr. Tierney admitted ruefully he could no longer play, about the success of the law firm. Mr. Tierney looked around the room, and he remarked, innocently, “This get-together reminds me of the smashing balls they used to throw during the Third Reich.”

  Natalie looked sharply at Daniel, who averted his eyes. It took him a moment to realize that when Mr. Tierney spoke about Nazis throwing smashing balls, he wasn’t talking about Kristallnacht. He meant that the Nazis gave lovely parties. “Were they wonderful?” Daniel asked, filling in the silence.

  Mr. Tierney nodded excitedly. “Before the United States imposed the embargo, our dealings with the German government presented some of the greatest profits this firm has ever seen. I went back and forth between America and Germany every month. We were having parties back here, they were having parties over there, celebrating Hitler’s plans to rebuild his nation.”

  “Sounds great!” Daniel exclaimed, and Natalie shot him another angry glance.

  She turned to Mr. Tierney. “I heard Hitler killed eleven million people,” she said gently. “Six million Jews. Five million others. Eleven million, right?”

  “Natalie, please,” Daniel begged.

  “What’s the matter?” Natalie exclaimed. “That’s just what I heard.” She now spoke to Mr. Tierney. “I’m not saying it’s true, sir. I’m just saying I heard it somewhere.”

  The old partner shook his head sadly. “It’s all right, Theo,” he said to Daniel. “I’ve heard those rumors too.” He now sank deeply into his memory, and his voice grew stronger, more youthful. “No, he could not have killed people in the millions,” he said. “He was a vegetarian, Theo, for goodness sake! And a gentleman. I recall, before we were precluded by government edict from doing business over there ... I recall tea parties he would throw. He was not an educated man, because as a youth his mind always moved faster than his teachers. While they were lecturing him about mathematics, he was planning vast public works projects to revitalize Berlin. So he left school, yet he longed for the life of a literate man. So he was more careful around those he admired. He got there by himself, without the aid of education: well-read, published author, world leader. Whatever else you say about him, he was the perfect gentleman at these tea parties, Theo, the way he would serve little slices of cake to the ladies, the way he would pour tea for each of us.” He sighed, lost in the glory of having been so close to greatness. The Fuhrer, pouring tea!

  “That’s a very interesting perspective,” Daniel said helpfully. “The liberal media doesn’t often mention that side of Hitler’s personality.” Not obsequious, not sycophantic, he insisted to himself. He was simply noting that, indisputably, the media did not often dote on Hitler’s perhaps delightful table manners. He glanced sideways at Natalie, who was frowning but controlling her temper.

  “Oh Theo!” Mr. Tierney exclaimed, nodding. “It’s a shame the way his name has been so sullied! And everything that goes along with it, of course such as the music of Wagner, the school song of my beloved alma mater, the swastika, which after all is merely the mythical Germanic ‘fire whisk’ that mixed the primordial soup at the creation of the universe.” He shook his head, pained at the small-mindedness of the world. “After the war, of course, the United States needed an excuse for having drained the blood from Germany. They could not say, We started the war because Rosenfeld was a Communist.”

  “Do you mean Roosevelt, sir?” Natalie asked.

  “My wife knows who you mean,” Daniel said, cringing. “I’m sorry if ....”

  Mr. Tierney laughed. “Theo, you amuse me so, you’re a good boy.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Natalie smiled politely. “Would you say you’re a Nazi, Mr. Tierney?”

  For the first time, the old man looked upset. "I'm as American as you are, young lady! I’m no Nazi. Nazi-sympathizer.”

  “Oh.”

  Daniel broke in quickly. “I’m sorry if my wife in any way might have – ”

  “If you’ll both excuse me,” Natalie interrupted, as she stood and shoved her way past Daniel. Daniel watched her leave the dining room. I like this no better than you do, darling, he shouted after her in his thoughts. But don’t try to ruin my life.

  Mr. Tierney paused. Had he forgotten this distasteful discourse? But then a glimmer of intelligence flickered into his eyes, and he plunged back into the history lesson. “I have never approved of the hypocrisy of government, Gerard, especially where a friend is concerned, but I can understand how Truman might have felt it necessary, considering the circumstances. So he said there were concentration camps, he said there were six million Jewish dead
. Certainly some died,” he added, shaking a finger in Daniel’s direction. “Hitler was trying to liberate Europe. In that struggle – it was a war for God’s sake – of course people would die. In the prison camps, some people died because there was not enough food or medicine. The common German man suffered in the war as well. Then the Zionists ‘document’ shower rooms meant to de-louse prisoners of war! These shower rooms were designed for their comfort, and instead they are used against Hitler to defame him posthumously.”

  “The Zionists were perhaps angry about Hitler’s dislike for Jewish people,” Daniel said, as gently as possible, and deferring to Mr. Tierney’s view of the parties to the conflict.

  Mr. Tierney shook his head. “Hitler was no more anti-Semitic than any of my friends,” he said, which Daniel believed. “He wanted Germany to be German, and perhaps the Jews were hindering that effort by throwing the average German worker into unemployment and charging perhaps an excessive interest rate. It is very hard to combat something like that, when your opponents control the newspapers. Very hard to get your message across, you know. About interest rates, about the Jewish interest rates.”

  “Interest rates going up, I mean anyone would feel – ”

  “Hitler once wrote: ‘Hardly in any people of the world is the instinct of self-preservation more strongly developed than in the “chosen people.” The fact of the existence of this race alone may be looked upon as the best proof of this. Where is the people that in the past two thousand years has been exposed to so small changes of the inner disposition, of character, etc, as the Jewish people? Which people finally has experienced greater changes than this one – and yet has always come forth the same from the most colossal catastrophes of mankind? What an infinitely persistent will for life, for preserving the race do these facts disclose!’ Hitler himself praised the Jew as ‘clever.’ That is his own choice of words. Of course, Hitler felt Germany would be stronger as a purely German state. That’s why it’s called ‘Germany.’ Because it’s German. So he envisioned a homeland for the Jews. And out of Hitler’s crucifixion came the state of Israel. I ask you, what would the state of Israel be without Hitler? It would be Palestine, that’s what.”