Beautiful Children

by Charles Bock

and rec simultaneously. Ponyboy stretched and took a long breath.

  Instinctively his weaker hand reached for the opposite tricep, and a tattoo—his fingers running along smooth warm stretches, raised indentations, ink over flesh over bone. From the point of his elbow to the bottom of his armpit—a tattoo of a long, opened zipper. Four hours of detail work had been devoted to making it look like the teeth of the zipper were open, as if exposing the flesh of Ponyboy's body, revealing the thick scar from where Jabba had cut him.

  After Jabba had sliced Ponyboy, he'd let Ponyboy use the phone. Cheri was supposed to be back on the stage in five minutes, but when she'd gotten that call, she'd driven like the proverbial bat out of hell. Ponyboy told her no hospitals, he did not want those fuckers to kill him like they'd killed his brother. Cheri had not known what to do, right in front of her eyes, her boyfriend was bleeding like a stuck pig. But her disconnect gimmick must have kicked in, because later she told Ponyboy that she'd seen herself watching him bleed. She'd watched herself help Ponyboy into a seat belt, and then seen herself get into her Jeep and floor the gas, eighty miles an hour back to the apartment. Ponyboy had been mumbling words that Cheri could not understand, and she'd propped his weakened and bloodied body up on her toilet and spoken patiently to him, like she was guiding a first-timer through the patter of a lap dance: Just reach up, okay baby? For the shower rod, okay?

  Her hands had been shaking and she had fumbled through the medicine cabinet and found the blue painkillers she used whenever her muscles hurt from squatting over the clothed dicks of men she didn't give a fuck about. Putting the little blue doodads in her boyfriend's mouth, she'd tilted his head back and told him swallow, swallow, and when he'd finally swallowed, she'd run and gotten the sewing kit she always meant to use for making quilts like on the WASP woman's show. Then she'd folded up one of the bathroom towels and put it in between her boyfriend's teeth and told him to bite down.

  Like Cheri was in a movie about Mother Teresa, she had saved him, sewing his body back together, bearing his flinches and convulsions, laying him down in her marble tub and running warm water over him and scrubbing. Later, she told Ponyboy that in this scene of the movie of her life, there was a part where the camera pulled up and back, into a wide shot, and from the corners of the screen darkness began creeping in, until the lighting around the two of them was like this fuzzy little cave, and the image of the movie star Cheri bathing her battered Ponyboy was like this small and almost holy moment.

  Yes sir ree bob, his girlfriend had sewed him up and spoon-fed him and pampered him. She'd put on her Horny Stripper Nurse costume and checked his fever and, oopsie, flashed him all the way up the length of her leg, to a high-cut panty. On an individual and regular basis Cheri had made Ponyboy feel like his health and welfare actually mattered—made him feel like he was worth something. Cheri Blossom was a lifesaver, a fucking miracle, this angel from the goddamn sky. Ponyboy knew it was true in that moment of crisis and he knew it was true now, in this moment of decision. He ran a callused palm over the raised stitch indentations of his scar, felt the hot pinching sensation of electric needle drilling into the skin of his mind.

  All the cool shit that Cheri's fake tits had purchased weren't enough for her to forgive Ponyboy for talking her into getting them done, he knew this. But he was equally sure there was money to be shaken from the tree of pornography. Ponyboy would have rather died than lose Cheri and he would have rather killed himself than gone back to peddling his ass on street corners to a bunch of old pervs. The bass from the stereo system was making Cheri's porcelain clown figures vibrate on their mantel, and Ponyboy was staring into the seventy-eight-inch high-definition flat screen that Cheri had purchased right after her tits had paid for themselves. He was shoving another fist of baked cheese crackers into his mouth and now he was fiddling with a fourth of July sparkler. And a plan was slowly starting to form, its barest and most scant beginnings. Not for a second would Ponyboy consider the strain this plan would bring into his relationship with the woman he loved. He would not think about how wrong things can go between two people, or how desperate he soon would be to make things right. Ponyboy rose off the carpet and made sure the second videotape machine was recording. He watched the wide and wondrous screen.

  5.4

  During that first fall, in the fallout of the boy's disappearance, Lincoln Ewing remained clean-shaven. His collared shirts remained pressed. He asked no quarter from his superiors at the Kubla Khan; neither did he try to lock his suffering away from the people he worked with. Quieter in meetings, he became less of a textbook alpha male, though not to the extent where he retreated behind any kind of granitelike exterior, the way loss seems to harden so many men. Rather, Lincoln considered more options than he ever had, took more input, and delegated more, all without abdicating his responsibilities, or foisting his duties onto others. In this way he empowered members of his staff, placing them in situations where each could carry out those functions for which he/she was best suited. Consensus in the office held that Lincoln's newfound openness added to the poignancy, made the whole thing sadder. His department flourished and his staff quietly set up a fund to help find Newell and, in short order, other divisions at the Kubla Khan contributed to the fund. Lincoln would stop in the middle of a hallway and quietly thank a coworker for their concern and contributions. He'd return the hugs of secretaries, exchange kind and hopeful words with anyone who was kind enough to be hopeful. And then he would retreat to his office and tell his assistant he needed a minute.

  Closing the flimsy door behind him, Lincoln would switch off the Nokia wireless he used for personal calls, and the BlackBerry that his office had him carry, and he'd sit and stare—gazing at the parking lot below him, or perhaps the rotating triangles on his screen saver. He played computer solitaire until the game's tracking meter could document a physical day of his life that had been wasted, at which point, disgusted with his inertia, Lincoln dragged the program into the trash. Although he did not care about his stocks, Lincoln fell into the habit of refreshing the webpage that tracked their progress so often that it became a nervous tic. He would return messages from his dad, compose loving and supportive e-mails to Lorraine, and receive updates from whichever private investigator he had on the case at that moment, all this while wrangling with law enforcement and missing-child agency staffers, politely handling their bureaucratic idiocies, smooth talking whoever he needed to approve his latest request, even as he secretly wished he could ram a cluster bomb up all of their asinine asses.

  The air had cooled noticeably, and the days were starting to get dark earlier, with people breaking out Windbreakers, and the first pumpkins appearing on windows and stoops. It was pitch-black outside, the dead of night, and Lincoln came home to the usual locked bedroom. He headed to the guest room and tucked himself underneath the covers, and, beneath him, he felt . . . these . . . these . . . things, all this fur moving, slinky and squirming. There was hissing. Lashing. Must have been, Jesus, twenty cats in there. “Fuck.” Lincoln leapt off the bed pronto. He went banging on the door of the bedroom he'd paid for. He demanded to know what the sam hell was going on. After a time the door opened. Lorraine was groggy; but even newly awake, she was matter-of-fact. She told him about the animal refuge. Saving all the poor stray kitties.

  His wife was hurting real bad, anyone could see this; even in his rage and his own grief Lincoln felt for her. She needed to cry? He gave her his shoulder. Needed space? He gave her space. Needed to lock him out of his bed and then transform the room where he slept into a wildlife preserve? Needed to watch that morbid video from the pizza party until she wore its film into mulch? Needed to turn what was already a nightmare into this living goddamn horror that Lincoln could not even begin to figure out how to address? He sludged downstairs. He tried to get comfortable on the couch in the living room. The truly ridiculous thing, he told himself, was this was the closest he'd been to pussy in quite some time.

  Didn't he have needs? It wasn't any
thing he could talk about; there wasn't anything to say, really. Lincoln shut up and went to work and went through the motions of his life. He lost five and ten and fifteen minutes at a time, slipping into fugues for which there was no accounting or explanation. A good chunk of one afternoon got wasted typing the names of former teammates into a search engine. The rest of that afternoon was spent doing the same thing with former girlfriends. Every single day he emptied his mailbox of electronic solicitations and just about every day, he quote unquote accidentally clicked on one, and then, each and every day, his next half hour was devoted to disentangling himself from the loops of interconnected pop-up advertisements. One moment Lincoln would be constructing a point-by-point response to some preliminary draft; in the blink of an eye he'd be registering for a three-day trial membership to an adult website, clicking the button that confirmed the discreetly billed charge of four dollars and ninety-five cents on his Bank One Platinum MasterCard. He'd be entering a six-letter password that started with N; opening the photo sections, perusing thumbnail galleries, and clicking on pictures he wanted to magnify to full screen size. Since the Khan had one of those networks where its computers were always online, Lincoln could just click back and forth between his reports and the photos. Blondes were his thing, mostly. Strong-legged blondes. Full round breasts. Childbearing hips. Lincoln wasn't so far gone that he was about to masturbate in his office in the middle of the workday. Basically he ogled, spending less time at his voyeurism than McKagan down the hall devoted to finding weekend police auctions to attend. Moreover, Lincoln made sure to cancel his trial memberships before their regular costs—thirty dollars a month—kicked in. He made sure to download the most attractive photos into the ACCNTNGMEM.EXE file of his hard drive. And then Lincoln would turn his attention back to his memoranda, to preparations for his next meeting, to revisions of that Power-Point presentation, to piles of never-ending, unfinished bullshit.

  Toward the end of October, at the end of an unnecessarily tense day, a few of the guys from the department were on their way out for a few beers, heading to this little dive. Lincoln offered to tag along. It was a short drive. A dark hole in the wall: mostly empty, a television above the bar switched to a fishing show on one of ESPN's lesser channels; a half-naked woman on a raised platform, swinging upside down from a pole. She seemed bored, maybe because there wasn't much of a crowd to dance for, and her movements were careless. Even so, there was a certain adjustment to having a live topless woman that was not your wife of twelve and a half years pole dance in front of you. A guy might sneak peeks at nakedness on the Web, but live nakedness was a different story. Lincoln bought the first round. Table conversation quickly turned to the stripper's breasts, a scale of one to ten. By the next round, talk centered on whether the stripper was worth taking home. Two of the men at the table were in their twenties, divorced, and if Lincoln remembered correctly, had kids. One guy wasn't thirty-five and was on his third marriage. Lincoln's coworkers loosened their ties. Lincoln sunk into his chair. He brought the screwdriver toward his mouth and tried not to be too obvious about staring at the stripper. Apparently he didn't succeed at this, because the stripper stopped dancing and came over. Putting her arm around Lincoln's shoulders, she asked if he liked what he saw. She mussed Lincoln's hair and said he was sweet and blew into his ear. Her body was warm against his and oh mercy was she built. Have a little fun, his coworkers urged, and sweet chariot mercy, could Lincoln have used a little fun just about then.

  But the boy was going to be found. His marriage was going to recover. There was work to be done, yes, and it wasn't going to be easy, no, but the work would get done, Newell would be found, and then this here situation, it was going to normalize. Lincoln had faith. Addressing the stripper by her first name, he bid her good night and thanked her for her attention. He purchased a round for the road for his coworkers and signed off on the entire bill, leaving instructions with the waitress for a gratuity that was generous indeed. Lincoln Ewing knew how to take care of people, yes sir. Sometimes, though, he wondered if the people who were supposed to take care of Lincoln Ewing did not know how to take care of him. If maybe they did not know how to take care of themselves. Maybe Lincoln had to take care of someone by going and finding his missing little pubescent ass himself and dragging it back home. Lincoln maybe had to take care of someone else by giving up his bedroom and giving her enough space so she could grow into an understanding of his devotion. However you wanted to cut it, a man did not bitch or make a production of his suffering or take the easy way out. A man did what he was supposed to do. In this case he left the Paradise Club, drove down Industrial a bit, and then made a turn and pulled his sedan in behind that cinder block wall. He entered the store through its side entrance and thought that by now the immigrant behind the counter must know his face.

  He settled above a particular box cover that had been handled more than a few times. Its cardboard was thin and indented along the bottom, where thumbprints smudged the blue backdrop. Lincoln grabbed those same areas. He paid cursory attention to the title—Temporary Positions, screaming across the top of the box. Rather, the platinum blonde was his focal point. Shapely. Lithe. Visibly young, yet old enough to know what she was doing, this particular young woman looked like she really knew: her lips moist and cherry-red, parted just so, the temple of her eyeglasses sitting suggestively between her biting teeth. She wore a businesswoman's blouse, which was opened at the throat, its gap trailing downward, revealing just enough of what seemed to be two lovely handfuls, the outlines of nipples suggesting a chilly day. One eyebrow was cocked, and she was staring at whoever thought he was man enough to pick up her box, defiant, daring that unknown person: take her on, be man enough to watch.

  Lincoln felt a sense of growing anticipation as he turned the box over and began examining the cluster of small pictures, still shots that had been taken from the movie using the same process that had put Newell's stare from that pizza party on hundreds of lamppost fliers. Did the blonde look appropriately excited about being bent over the copy machine? What was the deal with the little redhead spreading her legs atop the file cabinet? Lincoln started to read the summary—When sexy computer programmer Prada Nightingale takes a temp assignment at industry-leading Byte Software . . . —then just took the thing up to the counter.

  On the drive he called Lorraine—Yeah, honey, McKagan screwed everything up. I've got a shitload of stuff to fix. Unless of course he did not call home, but just headed back to his office and pressed a button and closed the blinds on his windows. The Khan's administrative level was high enough that nobody could see inside, but Lincoln closed the windows anyway. Maybe five or six times Lincoln also watched in the dark stillness of his own living room. He could not help himself, those times, and Lorraine was barricaded in her cave, and he would load a newly purchased black videotape into the machine. Admittedly, those were always uncomfortable experiences—in each case, Lincoln's conscience would disturb him and he'd lay off for a while afterward. Far easier, far safer, was to head back to work, shut the door to his office, and close the blinds. It still felt dirty, but in a way that was acceptable to Lincoln, a way he could live with. He fired up the machine he used for reviewing promotional materials and ad agency stuff. He hit the play button on the remote and then manipulated the dial thingy to adjust the tracking. Then, always, Lincoln turned down the volume so nobody from the next office could overhear. He performed this small and secretive ritual and the television screen went from blue to black and, inevitably, a blonde in a pink neg-ligé began fellating an earpiece; an olive-skinned brunette put the receiver between her obviously inflated breasts. She said, Pick up the phone and make me moan, and a 976 number flashed on the screen. Lincoln would learn to fast-forward through the commercials, as well as the public service announcements about free speech, and the WARNING disclaimer things, the bright orange counter speeding ahead.

  Of course, part of the goof was how dead-on the jokes and stereotypes turned out to be—all the non
sensical blue-collar fantasies, clumsy takeoffs of popular movies, and plot machinations that were nothing more than the flimsiest of excuses to mix and match fornicators; the acting beyond even the most patronizing expectations, portrayals of seduction and attempts at erotica that were nothing less than embarrassing, and background soundtracks so bereft of even vaguely redeeming qualities that they hardly qualified as music. In Temporary Positions, the software office was barren of computers. The programmers wrote their codes on paper, stored their files in cabinets. The hackers held up pliers and power tools before announcing a system was easy to crash. Mistakes someone had to know better than to make, and yet there they were, so numerous and unrelenting and varied as to guarantee that, sorry, no one knew better. But did it matter? The blonde from the cover sashayed onto the screen at double-time. Lincoln hit PLAY.

  A stunning woman. Really. In a world where children did not disappear, she would have been a model. A starlet. Perhaps even a showgirl in a Las Vegas review. And it wasn't only her. The executive's personal assistant was breathtaking in a particularly devilish and filthy way. The mousy programmer was a find. The women whose presences never got explained nonetheless were hot. Lincoln Ewing's life was a functioning state of purgatory, a daily walk amid incomprehensible circumstances. He loosened his belt and remained in his seat. He pushed at the carpet with his feet and rolled his chair back and provided himself a little more room to, ah, operate. Lincoln watched Temporary Positions. He watched Executive Privilege. He watched Going Down in Suburbia. One scene at a time, one tape at a time, a collection accumulating in the bottom right drawer of his desk at work, Lincoln Ewing entered a parallel dimension, where every woman was as beautiful as a medicated dream, eager as a honeymoon bride: leggy drinks of water who had not yet grown into their bodies; statuesque, hourglass-figured veterans with eye-popping, scientifically supplied cleavage; God-fearing corn-fed daughters; black chicks; Asians; ones who had heavy European accents; ones who had long Slavic faces; Mexicans; mulattos; white trash; each and every single one of them beyond the pale and orbit of mere mortals: with all-body tans or sexy bikini lines; with dragon lady fingernails painted in metallic colors and gold bands around index fingers and turquoise bands around manicured toes; women with visible rib cages and tummy chains and sexy tattoos on the lower part of the smalls of their backs; with nipples that were dark and pointed as chocolate kisses, with tongue studs and nipple rings; women with the glowing skin of youth and the slightest thickening to their tummies; with bruises on their legs from pole dancing mishaps; with teething marks; with pregnancy scars. Women varied and distinct and similar as the sunsets. Women young and no longer young, some as old as thirty. Lincoln did not know their names and did not want to know their names, and despite himself he would come to recognize a few: the Honey Linguses, the Chastity Cleavages. He would come to recognize more as well; hairstyles that defied both logic and gravity, dyes and streaks that had been done to match the style of popular Hollywood celebrities, but that had turned out like something more suited to Long Island drag queens. The sky would be black and Lincoln would be sitting in his ergonomically adjustable executive roller chair and his erection would be protruding through the flap in his silk boxers, and on the screen, three semi-beautiful idiots would be in varying states of undress, and all of a sudden Lincoln would find himself processing some woman's collagen pout and concave cheeks, her unnaturally wide nostrils, the wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and the bags beneath them and that flat, uncaring stare. . . .