The Narcissism of Small Differences

by Michael Zadoorian

  She soon found herself clicking across the marble threshold of the agency. (She had decided to wear heels, even though she had always found them painful and slightly ridiculous, but today she wanted to be as tall as possible.)

  The first person she saw: Jerrod Amburn. He smirked right up to her, well into her personal space. Ana had never seen someone look so self-satisfied.

  "Well, looky here—look who came to visit," he said disdainfully. "Guess the chickens have come home to roost."

  Ana didn't know if it was the suit or just the fact that she no longer cared, but she glared at him and pressed a finger into his chest as hard as she could. She was glad when he flinched. "Why are you so mean, Jerrod?"

  He looked bewildered by this statement. "I'm not mean."

  "Yes you are. You're very mean. Do you know that no one likes you because you're so mean?"

  He inhaled dramatically. "That's not true."

  "It is true. People just act like they like you because they're afraid of you. They're afraid that as soon as they walk away from you, you're going to say something awful about them. Because you do. They gossip with you about everyone else so you don't gossip about them. That's the only reason anyone talks to you."

  The smirk fell away and she saw that Jerrod knew she was right. He was a person that no one trusted.

  "I'm sorry," he said, in almost a whisper.

  "You should be sorry. It's no way for a person to be. You make me sad."

  Then she was done. Jerrod walked away much less buoyantly. Ana strolled up to Alethea the receptionist, who was trying very hard not to smile.

  What happened after that wasn't exactly the high point of Ana's life as a contemporary feminist, but it sure was fun. She spilled hard to The Exterminating Angel. Not all of it, of course; she left out the trip to Grand Rapids and anything else that implicated her as being actively involved. She even used some terminology that Sue would find familiar, recalling it from the company's annual workplace-sensitivity course. Ana alluded to a "hostile work environment," a place of "inappropriate" comments, not to mention Bruce's leering and touching, etc. Oh, such glee to watch the Angel squirm, lips tightened and flattened to her teeth, head fluttering with tiny, almost indiscernible hummingbird nods. This was all Ana wanted: to make the agency, as personified by one of its executive-committee toadies (sad that it had to be a sister), very uncomfortable. Ana then went in for the coup de grâce with "My attorney finds it all quite interesting." She hadn't really planned on what happened next.

  Sue Smithick took a long, silent look at her. Sue had to know that it was all true, but she may also have known that something happened between her and Bruce. (And Adrienne!) Still, did that really matter? To them, it was only the perception that mattered. Would the agency want to risk a scandal? "Head of Women's Marketing Group Sexually Harassed" was not a headline any agency wanted to see flash up on the daily Ad Age e-blast. Or worse yet, on AgencySpy, the mud-slingingest of them all. No, definitely not.

  That was when the packet appeared.

  * * *

  Feeling shaky, but better than she had in quite some time, Ana decided to call Adrienne from the car. (Joe had dispassionately relayed the information from Malcolm to her that Adrienne had quit the day after she had, bless her heart.)

  "Hey lady," said Adrienne. "I was wondering when I was going to hear from you."

  "I just had my exit interview. Have you had yours?"

  "Oh yeah. They got an earful. I told them that they were lucky that you didn't sue their asses."

  "Well, that explains a lot." Ana told her what happened with Sue Smithick.

  "What did you do when she pulled out the compensation packet?"

  "I took it and ran."

  "Damn right. That's some serious cigarette-and-pantyhose money." A pause on the line. "I'm really sorry about everything, Ana."

  "Forget it," she said, remembering why she loved Adrienne. "Just think about where you'd like to go for dinner. Somewhere fancy."

  After hanging up with Adrienne, the high started to fade and Ana thought about what had happened. Was this fair? She had signed up for all of it. She had put up with the jokes, enjoyed the attention, and had even stupidly allowed, perhaps encouraged, what had happened with Bruce. No, it probably wasn't fair that it would turn out this way. Did she care? In a word: no. As far as she was concerned, the agency had it coming for what they put her through.

  As fun as it was death-gripping the desiccated testicles of Edward Cherkovski (Adrienne's words), it was still cold comfort because of what was happening with Joe. How long would this go on? Were they already split up? Were they together? For right now, she was glad that they were still living under the same roof. It made her feel that things were not completely and irreparably severed. It all seemed sadly appropriate to Ana. She was part of a couple that was not quite married. She had not quite been unfaithful to Joe. And they were not quite broken up over it. It was so like the two of them. She hoped they could ride this out.

  Ana knew she wanted that, and that she still loved Joe, but that was all she knew. After a week of not working, her mind was just starting to clear. Leaving an agency job felt like easing from the depths of Stockholm syndrome, swimming upward to the blinding, rippled surface of sanity. She was still decompressing, but could feel a new calm rise within herself, even with all the worrying and crying and sleeping and fear of not knowing what would happen.

  It was a sense of release, a feeling of being let go.

  27

  The Verity of Decay

  After his embarrassing display at the Chin Tiki, Joe was surprised when Brendan invited him on another one of his "field trips." Joe certainly hadn't planned on ever setting foot in an abandoned building again. Yet he was torn. Did he really need to do this again? This was no gentle avocation like philately or tinkering together a schooner in a jug. It was illegal and dangerous and scary. At the same time, Joe wanted to try it once more and was not sure why. Perhaps a shadowy activity based on the exploration of broken things seemed sadly apropos to his state of mind these days. He'd felt so adrift lately, a floating fugue of sadness and anger and ennui, where he was always about five seconds away from a crying jag.

  That state of mind was probably why Joe agreed to participate. He woke up Sunday, feeling like crap after another night scooching around on that goddamned air mattress. It didn't help that Malcolm had talked him into going to a gallery opening in Hamtramck, then to see the High Strung at the Lager House that night. His ears were still ringing. Joe thought about showering, dismissed it, pulled some clothes out from his to-be-washed pile, threw on his Doc Martens, and left the house, not worrying if he woke Ana or not. After picking up coffee and a hot salt at New York Bagel, he drove down Woodward Avenue to meet up with Brendan at the corner of Park and Bagley downtown.

  They were walking on the street in front of the building and Joe was already nervous. He had read somewhere online that the old United Artists building had a charming history of dropping bricks onto cars and passersby. He tried not to think about it. The front doors of the place were sealed with weathered plywood, encrusted with gnarled and welted hip-hop posters for Esham and Trick Trick. Over two of the doors, someone had painted giant pink polka dots. Probably an acolyte of Tyree Guyton, who on Heidelberg Street had painted polka dots on old buses, car hoods, trashed kitchen appliances, and a sparsely populated block of mostly abandoned houses—crazy vibrant splashes of color and life and energy in a neighborhood decimated by crack and blight, a ghetto theme park. Joe had interviewed him once for the Independent.

  "C. Howard Crane," proclaimed Brendan, as they did a reconnaissance lap around the building. He paused before one of the dotted doorways and adjusted the camera bag slung across his chest.

  "What?"

  "Dude designed this theater in the twenties. He designed a shitload of theaters in Detroit back in the day. All over the place. He did the Fox, the Majestic, the State. C. Howard designed theaters like a motherfucker."
/>   "Really?"

  "Hells yeah."

  Somehow Brendan could say things like hells yeah and make it sound all right. If Joe had ever said anything like that, he was pretty sure that he would sound like a complete ass.

  "Remember I told you about this place, the way it looked a few years back?" Brendan continued. "A few graffiti artists had taken over the whole joint—Joy, Gram, Coupe. Most every window had a painting on it. Mayan hieroglyphics and shit. Looked so sick."

  Joe had researched it and found a couple of photos online. He did know what happened, but he wanted to hear Brendan's version. "Yeah, it really did look great. What happened?"

  "Just before the fucking Super Bowl came to Detroit in 2006, the owners had the place secured, then painted all the windows black. They hung a banner on the side of the building for 'development opportunities' or some such shit to trick everyone into thinking that the building was going to be renovated. Nothing ever happened. It's been empty ever since."

  Joe looked up and saw the banner now, stained and rag-torn, flapping in the wind against the side of the building. "Did you say secured?" he said, experiencing a slight tightness in his chest. "So this isn't like before, where it was so easy to get in?"

  "Oh no. This a bitch to get inside. It's gonna take some work to get up in this piece."

  "Oh boy."

  "Not to worry, cuz. I got a plan."

  * * *

  As it turned out, Brendan's plan was to scare the hells out of Joe. It was not pleasant. Walls were scaled, video cameras ignored, and advice like, "Whatever you do, don't look down," was dispensed. Once they were in, it was an incredible mess: broken glass, giant sloughed flakes of paint, plaster, dirt, rags, and trash everywhere. Joe was eerily conscious of the crunch all that debris made beneath his shoes, like some toxic breakfast cereal. Once their eyes adjusted to the light, Brendan gave Joe an LED flashlight headband.

  "Put this on."

  Joe started to tighten the band to put around his head.

  "No, no. Like this," said Brendan, as he hung his around his neck like a pendant. When he turned it on, the area around both their feet was illuminated. "So you can always see where you're walking."

  "Cool," said Joe. He did the same, then pulled from his messenger bag the big blue Maglite that he had purchased specifically for this adventure. He would not be caught with the little flashlight again.

  Brendan nodded approvingly, and then held up his hand. "Okay, now let's just be quiet for a minute."

  "What?"

  "Just listen."

  The two of them stood there, not saying a word. Joe didn't hear anything but the occasional pigeon and the faraway sound of traffic. When the sound of automobiles faded, there was only the hiss of silence. At one point, Joe shifted a foot in the rubble and Brendan shot him a look.

  After what seemed like a couple of minutes, Joe finally spoke: "What are we listening to?"

  "History," said Brendan. He closed his eyes for another ten seconds, then opened them. "Okay, let's go."

  "Wait a sec," said Joe. Now that he knew what they were listening to, he wanted to stand there a little longer.

  "Come on, let's hustle."

  "What's the big rush?"

  "You'll see."

  Brendan tugged at the sleeve of Joe's Carhartt. Joe followed, now a little concerned. Where were they going? Were they rushing to another hilarious thespian ambush by Malik? Whatever it was, Joe was suddenly happy to get away from where they were standing, its strong odor of dust and mold, along with a rotting, fetid smell that he could not place, as if the walls and inner structure of the building were decomposing.

  There in the murky grime and shuddering half-light (from unseen windows, unknown fissures, from the Maglites they carried), Joe glimpsed flashes of random images as they marched through the detritus: a mosaic of shattered glass here, a pile of bricks there, a broken chair with half a metal film canister leaning against it, a room filled with dozens of empty gallon jugs of Seagram's Gin, another room where someone obviously slept—a swelled and tattered human nest of yellowed newspapers. It made Joe think of the Irving Penn photographs from an old coffee table book he had reviewed ages ago for Out of the Attic. The book was called Passage, and in it were photographs of refuse—crushed cigarette butts, stomped-on paper cups, discarded rags, disintegrating lost mittens, and other objects found in the street. The photographs were eerily beautiful, stark black-and-white, flecked and folded with textured filth, the warp and weft of decay. Joe found himself wanting to stop and take some photographs, but Brendan kept rushing him along. He weaved the beam of his Maglite across the cluttered floor and walls as they traversed a hallway covered with graffiti, mostly names: Slack, Mo B, Mosh, Gray*, ABYS. It occurred to Joe that these were people who wanted to be heard, to offer proof that they existed, but came to a deserted, half-dead place to do it. He didn't know why that made sense to him, yet it did.

  Finally, after a few turns, they reached an area that felt like a side chamber of a theater. The lowness of the ceiling reminded Joe of certain claustrophobic anterooms of other old venues, places he had seen shows—the Masonic Temple or even the Fox, where you felt the compression of space, which then allowed you to feel relief when you entered the grand space of the auditorium. (C. Howard knew what he was doing.) Joe studied the swollen stucco as they passed. They ended up in what Joe believed was once the round main lobby of the theater.

  The floors of the rotunda were covered with debris, even more than where they came in—paint and plaster, brick and statuary, a flokati of dried sludge and curled silt. You couldn't really say the walls were bare, because mostly there were no walls. Two of the three Gothic arches on one side of the rotunda were now stripped clean—the elements and the vandals were sloughing the place from the inside out, revealing the tessellated cinder-block bones of the building. Where there were walls, you could see remnants of gold-leafed ornamentation gone to chalk, traces of intricate designs, petroglyphs of lost grandeur.

  Eventually, Brendan allowed them to pause for a moment to take in what they were looking at. Near them, Joe was stunned by the sight of a relatively unscathed gray-white wall, its ornamentation still intact, a two-story art deco Indian maiden in plaster bas-relief, her face placid and all-seeing, her towering headdress curving against the vaulted ceiling, the sleeves of her gown stretching almost to the ground, the intricate, fruited folds of it deeply engrimed, dotted with black mold, but still exquisite. The only desecration was where someone had written at the bottom of the wall, not in graffiti style, but in a clawed marker script: My Heart Is Missing.

  "Wow," said Joe, gazing up at the tableau in front of him. It was a silly thing to say, he thought, but it was what he said.

  "Yeah," said Brendan, smiling. "Wow. I don't know why the vandals haven't trashed this one. There used to be six of them."

  Joe stared up at the maiden, not sure what he was feeling—it was strange to encounter this beauty in the middle of such carnage.

  Brendan pulled out his Nikon, set up the small tripod he'd slung over his back, and took some photographs. The light from his flash unit hurt Joe's eyes.

  Joe took a few shots as well, using only the available light, which wasn't much.

  Then Brendan was ready to leave again. "Come on, let's keep moving."

  Joe was starting to understand why he didn't want to stay in one place too long. This was a lot to take in, an assault on the senses. He was feeling overwhelmed. Joe followed Brendan up a flight of side stairs. Somewhere beneath Joe's feet, under the grime and gnarled paint and disintegrated plaster, was softness, a fleshy memory of carpeting. He held his light pendant as they scurried up the stairs to keep himself from getting dizzy. The two of them surfaced onto the mezzanine for a full view of the theater. They stopped again.

  Brendan turned to him. "The view's better from up here. And it's safer."

  Joe needed to catch his breath, not just from sprinting up the stairs, but also from what was laid out in front of hi
m. He stared out at an immense palace of ruin. Sunlight had indirectly found its way into the auditorium from ceiling fissures and hidden smashed-out windows, giving the place a brownish-gray cast. It was the color of the doves that he could hear roosting somewhere. The giant room smelled of damp and guano and rust and rotting plaster and moldering fabric, as if the two of them had slalomed up the alimentary canal of some behemoth to its vast bloated stomach and were now examining what it had eaten before it died. Joe thought of climbing through the Trojan horse in The Dream Life of Balso Snell. Then he noticed that leaking in from somewhere high above them was the fresh smell of spring air.

  Forty-foot-long tatters of curtains hung over what was once a stage. Flanking the stage were the jagged mammoth remnants of broken Gothic filigree where the pipe organs were housed. Above them, giant cone-shaped sconces snugged the ceiling. Traversing the sconces were X-shaped light vents now crushed or dissolved by water. On either side of the balcony were shattered vestiges of the Indian motif. A small bas-relief of a face much like the one of the maiden peeked at Joe from high, too far up for the vandals to smash.

  "Goddamn," Joe said. At that moment, he couldn't help but wish that Ana were there to see this. Was she capable of appreciating something like this anymore? He didn't know, yet he had a feeling that she would.

  "Take a look at that proscenium," said Brendan. "It's still incredible."

  Joe was surprised by how tranquil he felt in this place. The two of them just stood there looking around. He wasn't even sure for how long. It may have been a half hour for all he knew.

  "It's strange to think about all the people," Joe said, when he finally spoke.

  "People?"

  "Yeah, the thousands of people—the millions—who probably walked through here over the years, just going to the movies. Seeing Doctor Zhivago or Shaft's Big Score! or I Am Curious (Yellow) or whatever." He took a breath. "Just standing here, you can feel that people lived in this place. They laughed and applauded and cried. They met future husbands and wives. They brought their kids. They threw popcorn and drank pop and broke their teeth on jujubes."