It Occurs to Me That I Am America

by Richard Russo

  Europe’s economy had almost failed again except that the Germans bailed out the Greeks with money that neither of them had. China was going to take over the American economy and make Michael and everyone he knew into communist slaves living in dormitories and eating rice.

  But if no one could buy the goods, then China’s economy might fail and it would engage its two-hundred-million-man army to reclaim all the money we borrowed to pay for the health insurance of undocumented, Spanish-speaking, job-stealing illegal immigrants.

  There were microbes in the water after the storm. Militant Muslims had used the cover of the downpour to move explosives under churches and big businesses. They weren’t afraid of the rain like Michael and other poor Americans who just wanted to work until retirement . . . never came.

  • • •

  The phone rang on the morning of the third day that Michael had not gone in to work at Prospect, Farr, Grant, and Heldhammer.

  Michael picked up the receiver but did not speak.

  “Mike?” someone said. “Mike, is that you?”

  “Michael is not here,” Michael heard himself say. He felt safe behind the subterfuge of those words. He wasn’t at home and therefore couldn’t be reached; couldn’t be touched, burned, infected, blown up, or experimented on by sales scientists working in subterranean desert laboratories for the superstores.

  “Mike, it’s Finnmore, Ron Finnmore. Mr. Russell is wondering where you are.”

  “I’ll leave him the message,” Mike said, and then he put the phone back in its cradle.

  After hanging up Michael had the urge to giggle but suppressed it. He knew that if he showed any emotion so soon they’d say he’d gone crazy and take him away.

  • • •

  It rained the next day and so Michael felt justified in calling PFGH and telling them that he wasn’t coming in due to the inclement weather.

  “It’s just a few showers,” Faye Lesser, Thomas Grant’s assistant’s secretary, said.

  “That’s how the last storm started. What if I got there and it came down like that again? Who would feed my cat?”

  Michael didn’t have a cat. He didn’t have a fish or even a plant. If he had had a plant it would have died because he hadn’t pulled up the shades since the storm.

  The television took on a new role in the young man’s life. It spoke of conspiracies and disasters both domestic and foreign that were increasing in severity like the storm that had raged over New York. There were mad cows and rampant use of hormones and antibiotics. The Y chromosome in men had shrunk to the point where men might cease to be men and would soon have to learn how to be women without wombs.

  There were prisons across the country that together released at least a hundred convicted killers every week and banks that created bad debt (Michael was never sure how they did this) and then sold the nonexistent interest to pension plans that subsequently failed.

  Michael started taking notes. He had five folders that he’d bought for his financial records but never used. He labeled these folders: DISEASES, NATURAL DISASTERS, MANMADE DISASTERS, FINANCIAL DISASTERS, and HUMAN THREATS. Five folders was just right for the notes he needed to compile. He saw this as a sign that he was meant to stay in his fourteenth-floor apartment and study the truth that so many people missed because they went to work and therefore somehow, inexplicably, betrayed themselves.

  He spent whole days looking up fires, floods, serial killers, and food additives on his cell phone. He ordered hundreds of cans of beans and tuna, concentrated orange juice and powdered milk from delivery services. He made them leave the foods at the apartment door and collected them only when he was sure that no one was in the hall.

  He used his phone to pay his bills until his accounts went low.

  The super brought up his mail and left it at the threshold for him.

  He had been fired, of course. His girlfriend, Melanie, told him that either he would meet her at the Starbucks on Forty-Second Street or she was breaking up with him. His mother called but Michael fooled her by saying that Michael wasn’t home.

  And he was getting somewhere with his research.

  At first he thought that the problem was that there were too many people but he gave up that theory when he realized that people working together would be benefited by great numbers. Finally he understood that it wasn’t the number of souls but the plethora of ideas that bogged down the world. It was like the old-time Polish parliament in which nothing could be decided as long as anyone held a contrary point of view.

  The problem with the world was a trick of consciousness: people believed in free will and independent thinking and were, therefore, dooming the world to the impossibility of choice. Yes. That was the problem. Together all the peoples of the world—Muslims, Hindus, and Jews; Christians, atheists, and Buddhists—would have to give up disagreements if they wanted the human race to survive the storm of incongruent consciousness, which was even worse than the weather that had brought New York to its knees.

  Michael felt that he was making great progress. He was beginning, he was sure, to articulate the prime issue at the base of all the bad news the New York Times had to print. He was trying to imagine what kind of blog or article he could author when the eviction notice was shoved under his door. It had only been six weeks . . . no, no, no, nine. Just eleven weeks but he was rent stabilized and the collusion of city government and greedy landlords made prompt evictions possible when there was potential for rent that could soar.

  After midnight, working for two weeks, Michael drilled forty-eight holes along the sides, top, and bottom of his door and similarly placed holes in the doorjamb and along the floor. He used a handheld wireless drill to do this work. Through these connective cavities he looped twined wire hangers, two strands for each hole. This reinforcement, he figured, stood a chance of resisting a battering ram if it came to that.

  He also used melted candle wax to seal the cracks at the sides of the door so that the police couldn’t force him out with tear gas.

  His beard had begun to sprout and his hair had grown shaggy. He looked to himself like another man in the mirror: the man who answered the phone for the absent Michael.

  He filled the bathtub to the drain in case the super turned off the water.

  On his iPhone he read the newspapers, studied the Middle East, Central America, and the Chinese, who, he believed, had gained control of capitalism without understanding its deteriorative quality.

  Finally all those boring political science courses—the ones he’d taken when he thought he might want to be a lawyer—had some use.

  He was well on his way to a breakthrough when the landline rang.

  He always answered the phone because, in a discussion with the man in the mirror, he deduced that if no one answered they might use the excuse that there was some kind of emergency behind his coat-hanger-reinforced door.

  “Hello?”

  “May I speak to Michael Trey, please?” a pleasant man’s voice asked.

  “He’s not here.”

  “Then to whom am I speaking?”

  This was a new question and it was very smart—very. This was not just some befuddled contrarian thinker but one of those unofficial agents who pretended to protect freedom while in reality achieving the opposite end.

  “My name is X,” he replied, and suddenly, magically, Michael ceased to exist.

  “X?”

  “What do you want?”

  “My name is Balkan, Bob Balkan. I’m an independent contractor working for the city to settle disputes.”

  “I don’t have any disputes, Mr. Balkan Bob. As a matter of fact, I might be one of the few people in the world who does not disagree.”

  “I don’t understand,” the independent contractor admitted.

  “I have to go, Bob.”

  “Can you tell me something first, Mr. X?”

  “What’s that, Bob?”

  “What do you want?”

  The question threw X out of Michael’s
mind. The man who was left felt confused, overwhelmed. The question was like a blank check; a hint to the solution of a primary conundrum from a superior alien life-form. It had ecclesiastical echoes running down a corridor heretofore unknown in Michael’s mind.

  “What do I want?” Michael repeated the words but changed the intonation.

  “Yes,” Balkan Bob said.

  “I want . . . I want people everywhere to stop for a minute and think about only the essential necessities of their lives. You know, air and water, food and friendship, shelter and laughing, disposal of waste and the continual need for all those things through all the days of their lives.”

  Balkan Bob was quiet for half a minute and so Michael, not X, continued, “If everybody everywhere had that thought in their mind, then they would realize that it’s not individuality or identity but being human, being the same, that makes us strong. That’s what I’ve been thinking in here while the rain’s been falling and the landlord was trying to evict me.”

  “But Michael hasn’t paid the rent, Mr. X.”

  “I have to go, Bob,” X said, and then Michael hung up.

  • • •

  Eight days later the electricity was turned off. The grocery delivery service had brought him twelve fat nine-inch wax candles, so he had light. It was all right to be in semidarkness, to be without TV, radio, or internet. Michael had his five folders and the knowledge of a lifetime plus four years of college to filter through.

  Two days after the electricity went off it came back on. Michael wondered what bureaucratic and legal contortion had the man with his hand on the lever going back and forth with the power.

  The phone rang again.

  When it sounded Michael realized that there had been no calls for the past forty-eight hours, not his mother or Melanie, who worried that her demands had brought him to this place.

  He always answered the phone but never stayed on for more than a minute.

  The phone didn’t depend on the power system. Maybe the phone company had cut him off for not paying his bill and then, at the behest of the city, had turned the service back on.

  “Hello,” X said.

  “Mr. X?”

  “Bob?”

  “How are you?”

  “Things are becoming clearer all the time, Bob,” X said. “I just don’t understand why you cut off my power and then turned it back on again.”

  “I didn’t do it,” he said.

  “But you’re working for the people who did, or at least their friends and allies.”

  “Do you feel that you are at war, Mr. X?”

  “I’m just an innocent bystander who has made the mistake of witnessing the crime.” X was much more certain about things than Michael was.

  “I recorded your statement about what you wanted. Someone in my office released the recording to the media. You have lots of friends out here, Mr. X. If you look out your window you’ll see them in the street.”

  “I’d like to but there might be something there I don’t want to see. And I don’t want anyone seeing me.”

  “No one wants to hurt you,” Bob said in a very reassuring voice.

  “No one wants to kill children in Afghanistan but no one cries over it either.”

  “You haven’t come out of your apartment since we got hit by the hurricane.”

  “And here I don’t know anything about you.” Somewhere Michael was aware of the difference in the way he and X talked.

  “What do you want to know?” Bob Balkan offered.

  “You ask good questions, Bob.”

  “And?”

  “Do you think that we’re equal to our technology?”

  “Maybe not.”

  “So why are you on my ass? That’s all I’m saying.”

  “Let me ask you a question, Mr. X.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Do you think that we’re equal to our biology?”

  Neither Michael nor X was ready for that question. It got down to the crux of what they had been trying to figure out. If the human mind, Michael thought, was the subject of biological instinct, then there was no answer, no agreement, nor any exit from madness.

  Stroking his beard, Michael forgot about the phone call and wondered if his own body was an unconscious plot against the idea of humanity, humanness. Machines and techniques could be torn down and abandoned but what about blood and bone, nerves and hormones? Was he himself an aberrant machine set upon an impossible mission amid the insouciant materials of existence? Was his resistance futile?

  While he was considering these questions the phone went dead and the lights cut off. There came sounds of heavy footfalls in the hallway. Suddenly there was a great thumping wallop against his steel-reinforced, hanger-looped fire door. The police battering ram hit the door nineteen times, by Michael’s count. The locks and hangers, doorjamb and metal infrastructure held. The pounding ceased and voices sounded up and down the outside hall.

  There were shouts and curses. One man suggested that they break through the wall.

  Michael armed himself with a butcher knife but then put the cooking weapon down.

  “I can’t hurt anybody,” he said to no one.

  • • •

  That night Michael slept on the living room floor in front of the door. His iPhone was dead and the lights were cut off but under candlelight he read Man’s Fate by André Malraux. He felt for the characters in the novel although, for the most part, he did not identify with them. Revolution, Michael thought, was both personal and shared, and everyone, and everything, had a part in it. His only affinity was with the feeling of doom and dread threaded throughout the book. He believed that soon he would be killed because he had decided to stop moving forward with the herd toward slow but certain slaughter.

  “Mike. Hey, Mike,” a voice hissed.

  Michael had fallen asleep. He believed that his name was part of a dream but he didn’t know why someone calling out to him would be important.

  He tried to lift his right hand but it wouldn’t move.

  “Mike!” The whisper became more plaintive.

  Suddenly afraid that people had secretly come in and bound him, Michael lurched up, jerking his right hand from whatever held it.

  His fingers were encased in wax. The candle had burned unevenly and warm wax had pooled and dried around his hand. Michael laughed to himself, relieved that he was safe. He blew out the burning wick.

  “Mike!”

  The ventilation plate in the living room had a faint light glowing between its slats.

  Michael’s first impulse was to cover that opening with plastic and masking tape, but he hesitated.

  He pulled a chair to the wall and got up on it so that he could stand face-to-face with the brass plate.

  “Who is that?” he asked.

  “Mike?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s Tommy Rimes from the apartment next door.”

  “The tall guy with the mustache?”

  “No,” the voice said. “I’m the guy who goes bowling all the time.”

  Michael remembered the squat middle-aged man with the potbelly and the red bowling-ball bag.

  You wanna go run down some pins? he once asked Michael.

  “What do you want, Mr. Rimes?”

  “They got you all over the news, Mike. From Occupy Wall Street to the Wall Street Journal they all been talkin’ about you. You went viral on the internet now that the cops couldn’t beat down your door. Fisk, the guy with the mustache on the other side’a you, videoed it and put it up on YouTube. You’re a celebrity.”

  Michael was peeling the wax from his fingers, wondering what notoriety would get him. Would it hold the hurricanes back or keep the communists from conquering capitalism? Would it get Melanie to take him back?

  “Mike?” Michael had all but forgotten that Tommy Rimes was there.

  “What?” the newly minted celebrity asked.

  “Can you take off the ventilation plate?”

  “Why?�
��

  “I’m gonna push through a power strip and this aquarium hose I got. That way you can have power again and if they cut off your water you can have that.”

  “Why?”

  “This rich guy from uptown put what you said to the city psychologist up on a billboard down the street. I like it. I mean, I think you might have somethin’ there. And even if you’re wrong, I like it that you’re stickin’ it to the landlord.”

  • • •

  By morning Michael had light, and once he powered up his phone he found that it was still working. There was an email from Melanie telling him that she had paid his phone bill. On his tiny phone screen he could see newscasts covering a thousand people in the streets outside his apartment building protesting the police, the mayor, the landlord, and everyone who uses the law to keep people apart.

  “I believe that Mr. Trey is trying to speak for all of us,” a young black woman with braids that stood out from her head like spikes said to an interviewer. “I mean, here we are working hard and barely able to live. We eat junk food and watch junk TV and our schools are being closed down because they’re so bad. The police will frisk anybody except if they’re rich or something and we’re fighting a war. Mr. Trey has just stopped. He’s saying that he doesn’t want to be a part of all this [bleep] and that we should all do the same.”

  “I’m a conservative,” a white man in a dark-blue suit told a camera. “I believe that we have to fight the war and bail out the banks but I still wonder about what this guy says. I think he’s crazy but you can’t deny that there’s something wrong with the world we’re living in.”

  Both the liberal and conservative press praised Michael. They called him a people’s hero who was refusing to take one more step before the other side made changes. They bent his words, however—that’s what Michael thought. They didn’t understand that the whole idea was not to have a hero but to discover a natural credo to unite people and keep them from destroying themselves.

  “We love Michael Trey!” two beautiful young women shouted at one camera.