This Is Not the End

by Caleb Hildenbrandt

  “I thought the English used milk.” Phillip said. The “tea” was transluscent; I could see the fine crack in the tea cup’s glaze running all the way to the bottom.

  We were silent for a moment more.

  “Let’s go home.” he said.

  #

  We sold the house a few months after we got back. I got tired of going down to the growlery to microblog, and Phillip didn’t like using a manual lawnmower. We ended up getting married. We live in an apartment. He loves me. He calls me nearly every day on the cell phone and leaves a message. I always delete them. To this day I can’t stand to hear his voice on a recording.

  Harold

  I still remember the first time I met Harold. When my friend had told me about a tax accountant who worked on the cheap, I jumped at the chance. When I learned that this accountant operated out of a city trolley, however, I momentarily balked.

  “You mean he canvasses for clients by riding the bus?”

  “No,” said my friend, “He works in one.”

  I had trouble shaking the idea that Harold, as my friend informed me was the accountant’s name, worked as a mechanic to supplement his income, or perhaps took advantage of the commuting time to process paperwork.

  “No,” insisted my friend, “He has his office in the number 13.”

  #

  I stumbled as the trolley pulled away from the curb, staggering the rest of the way to the back. At first glance, I thought there was some mistake. Perhaps I had the wrong bus. A bum was clearly occupying the rear three seats, his duffel bag, a bed roll, and bulging plastic grocery sack spread out around him. He was dozing, a paper bag-wrapped bottle in one hand and an oversized calculator in the other. I decided it was worth a chance.

  “Excuse me,” I said, “Harold?”

  He snorted awake. “Yeah?”

  “Um, Mr. Blane, I--you were recommended to me as an accountant.”

  He slowly straightened.

  “What’ve you got?”

  “Well…” I stalled.

  “Give it ’ere.” He slurred, grabbing my briefcase and popping it open on his lap. “Ah.”

  “Um, excuse me, could you hand back--”

  Harold made a dismissive wave with his free hand, his other sifting through stacks of forms and certificates.

  “Okay, I’ll take it.”

  “Well.” I said, “I mean, I hadn’t quite decided, uh, that is, do you… even have any credentials?”

  A part of me regretted using the word “even,” but I think I was justified, if you’ll consider the circumstances. Dimly, I looked on the trolley walls for framed diplomas. Harold snorted and began rummaging around in the duffel bag at his side. Eventually he pulled out a dirty, dog-eared piece of paper covered in stains, with one corner missing. I took it when offered and looked at it. There were several rings where it appeared Harold had used his authorization to practice accounting as a coaster. In the lower right corner, where the signature should have been, a massive blot obscured whatever name might have once been there.

  “I think I’d better go else--”

  Harold interrupted: “Here’s your suitcase.”

  The suitcase, emptied of its pertinent documents, was thrust at me.

  I’ll never know why, but I took it in silence and meekly turned to leave.

  “Come back next Tuesday,” Harold muttered after me. It seemed almost a snarl.

  #

  I questioned the wisdom of the whole affair.

  #

  When the next Tuesday arrived, the number thirteen did as well, pulling up with a screech of brakes at the corner of Lovell and Main. I paid my dollar-twenty-five and walked to the back. Harold was there, hunched over what closer inspection on my part revealed to be a 1993 IBM Thinkpad. I followed the cord with my eyes, across the seat on the outer edge of which Harold sat, down to the floor, and into a highly improbable, not to mention dangerous-looking, electrical outlet.

  “Erhem.” I said. It didn’t sound nearly as commanding as I had hoped.

  Harold looked up, pulling as he did so a pair of plastic-framed glasses from his head.

  “Oh, Phil, right? Got your return right here.”

  He reached behind him and pulled from his duffel bag a manila envelope. I took it from his slackly-outstretched hand and looked through the contents. I wasn’t sure whether or not to expect beer-can rings or, perhaps, “balls” scrawled in the margins. All my 1040’s schedules seemed to be there, though, with at least a plausible number of boxes checked. I started to fill out a check when Harold stopped me.

  “Cash,” he said. “I already made my bank run for the day.”

  When I paused, he softened.

  “C’mon,” he said, “I kinda need it now.”

  “I thought you just went to the bank.” I’m not sure what made me say that, except perhaps a desire to stall what I felt was an approaching ominous stage in my financial life.

  “Look, I’m just a little short right now. You don’t mind? I can take it… tomorrow I guess, if you don’t have it on you. Just a deposit now.” He was practically wheedling.

  “All right,” I said, in the attitude of one halfway between accomplice and carnival-mark, pulling the bills from my wallet. I had enough. Like my friend had told me, Harold worked for peanuts.

  #

 

  I went over the documents when I got home. I was amazed. Harold was good. Really good. Also, I was willing to bet, slightly unethical, but I was too hard up to quibble about abstractions. The money he saved me would go a long way, and I knew it was air-tight. I took the H&R Block coupons that had been sitting on the kitchen counter, and I tossed them into the trash.

  #

  It wasn’t until the next year that I again went to see Harold. He was still there, greyer, perhaps, around the temples, his eyes set deeper in his face, but still there, hunched over his decrepit laptop and typing away, seemingly oblivious to the ups and downs of the bus as it rattled over the cracked thoroughfare. He seemed to remember me, but I couldn’t be sure. When I introduced myself as a returning customer, he may have just been acting polite, in an effort to maintain business. Our conversation was more relaxed, at least on my end, and this time I found myself looking more closely at his makeshift office. Maybe now, confident that he knew what he was doing, I was unafraid of looking openly, without the apprehension surrounding the unknown elements I might discover.

  The electrical socket was still there. I peered closer--it appeared that Harold had managed to open an access panel in the trolley wall, cut into the electrical wires that powered the bus, and splice in a convoluted sequence of transformers and power adaptors, finally terminating in a bare-bones outlet on a dowel lashed to the bench leg. With duct tape.

  “Hey, siddown. I got people coming,” Harold rasped to me as he closed his laptop and took a slip of paper from his plastic shopping bag.

  A young man and woman were walking down the aisle of the bus, twisting their necks back and forth as if looking for someone. Harold ran a hand through his hair, a tongue over his teeth, glanced at the window, and cleared his throat. The two saw him and walked over.

  I watched, fascinated.

  Harold now had the slip of paper around his neck in a sort of clerical collar and was holding a Gideon Bible. With admirable efficiency of method, he ran through some vows and pronounced the fidgeting but clearly excited couple man and wife.

  I noticed for the first time that the newlyweds had duffel bags at their feet. After a kiss and exchange of rings, they picked up the bags and walked hand-in-hand a few rows down, returning to the front of the bus, sliding into seats and promptly sliding from view until only the tops of their heads were intermittently visible.

  When I looked back at Harold, the collar was nowhere to be seen, and the Bible was propping up the laptop, on which he was once again intently typing.

  #

  “Hell of a book. Great stuff
. Gotta love that mother.”

  It was an exemplary specimen of Harold’s sense of wit that he referred to Maugham as a mother. He and I were sitting at a table in one of the more pricey city restaurants. For the past half hour, he had talked of nothing but The Moon and Sixpence, of which I remembered only that I had read it sometime in college.

  I was far from satisfying my curiosity (whose origins were mysterious even to me), but two weeks of riding the bus, after I got off work, at odd hours, had divulged a lot about this man. Most of it, though, was trivial. Most of what I had learned today had to do with his views on literature and the correct method of preparing tomato-basil bisque. (The bowl in front of him wasn’t to his liking; the cook had apparently scalded it.) I nibbled a sandwich to fill the silence following his summation of art and artistry. There were still some questions on my mind, not the least of which concerned how he had managed to carry on for as long as he had. The trolley driver and patrons appeared to be either unaware of his existence or quietly accepting of it. I had gradually acclimated to the realization that no one seemed surprised to see a man leeching electricity off the city power grid, performing marriages that ranged from the civil to the highly ritual, holding an accountancy office, arbitrating disputes, and baptizing babies--all on a moving bus. In my past two weeks of intense and, so I had thought, undetected observation, I had seen him conduct

  1) a bar mitzvah, attended by five people, complete with Talmudic scrolls and kosher after-food,

  2) a shotgun wedding, actual shotguns present and barely concealed (this in addition to the probable elopement I had witnessed earlier), and

  3) a baptism, which he accomplished by sprinkling water out of the canteen he always carried and on which he had glued a wooden crucifix for the occasion.

  At one point I was called upon as a witness. Two angry men had climbed aboard the bus, snarling at each other and apparently seconds away from hand-to-hand combat. They had tromped to the back of the bus where Harold sat, talking to a young man with his hand on his stomach. When the two men, who appeared to collectively weigh a sum approaching five hundred pounds, tried to barge in, Harold waved them off; when they tried to shove the stomach-clutching man away, Harold, without getting up or any apparent effort, unleashed a string of profanity that described the two men’s matrilineal descent and cranial capacity/contents in no uncertain terms.

  This with a completely straight face, still fixed on his conversant, without so much as a glance at the two mammoths who towered above him.

  Harold, who stands somewhere between my tie tack and chin, who has been known to become briefly airborne whenever his office goes over a speedbump.

  Yeah.

  It seemed he was in a discussion of gastrointestinal symptoms. After listening to the young man’s complaints for another minute, he nodded sagely, reached into his bag, and pulled out a business card. He scribbled briefly on the back and handed it to the young man, who smiled, nodded, shook Harold’s hand, and reached for his wallet. A twitching look of tension stole over his face as he rifled the folds, alleviated when Harold pointed at something in the wallet. I couldn’t hear what was said, but I couldn’t help smiling when I saw Harold pocket a bus pass as the doors swished open to admit the young man to the outside world.

  Harold then turned and regally gestured for the two near-combatants to approach--although I have to admit that the regality was probably more in my mind than reality: his actual motion was somewhere between boredom and resignation. They came closer and I leaned in from my vantage point several rows away: apparently they had a dispute regarding a car one had sold to the other. Sans any examination of physical evidence, Harold dispensed his verdict after hearing a single testimony and single rebuttal from each party. Before dismissing them, Harold called me over (with a casual aplomb that completely destroyed my belief in the efficacy of my incognition) to sign a piece of paper to the effect that I had been present and seen the dispute’s resolution and acceptance. This paper, after being signed by the men and Harold, was slipped into a folder containing dozens of similar papers, disappearing once again into Harold’s duffel bag. Both men seemed pleased, and got off together at the next stop, without a trace of their former animosity.

  #

  After that, I no longer bothered to conceal my watching. Harold didn’t seem to mind; he never acknowledged my presence unless he needed something. He seemed to have accepted me as a sort of apprentice, or assistant-in-training:

  “Phil,” he would say, “what time is it?”

  “Do you got a stamp? I need to send off this return.”

  “Say, Phil, could you hold this kid while I get the oil uncorked?” He turned to the parents in front of him after handing off a squirming child. “He’s a good man, an old friend. We knew each other back in seminary.”

  The parents seemed to accept this. After all, if you have one practicing Orthodox minister on a trolley, why not two?

  This dual role of surveillance and abetment was getting me nowhere, and I had decided to ask him out to lunch. I needed to understand what was going on. And so far all I understood was that one must stir bisque frequently to avoid developing a skin across the top, and that salt should be used in said preparation sparingly.

  “A man has a right to choose, doesn’t he?” said Harold, apparently referring to the amount of salt.

  I wondered if Harold had ever conducted a funeral. I wouldn’t put it past him. Maybe a memorial service.

  When the waiter came to present the tab, I paid, unprotested, and we left. It was so clichéd that I half-expected it, but I still had to suppress a second glance when, as we walked past the concierge, Harold grabbed a handful of complementary peppermints and stuffed them into his pocket. When he withdrew his fist the pocket flap stayed shoved inward and the bulge of the candy swung against the doorframe as we left. We said goodbye there and walked away, I to go to my car and home, and Harold back to the bus. He has a bed roll, I thought, but how does he brush his teeth? Then I remembered the small faucet I had noticed under the seat the last time I visited, a spigot lifted from a park fountain, attached to a thin rubber hose. A hole had been cut in the floor of the bus, and a basin, also with a hole, set inside. I remembered that the ancient city busses still used water radiators. He’ll manage, I thought.

  #

  Two years had passed since the day I first encountered Harold, and I again brought him my taxes. As usual, pockets of unforeseen money brilliantly appeared, and I walked away a happy man. We continued to lunch together, several times a week. He never protested my taking the bill, and never seemed to question my interest, although if he had my explanation would have been simple enough: I had never met anyone like Harold. I had certainly never sent my taxes to anyone like him. And he knew more than taxes.

  When my transmission died, I went to Harold. I knew he couldn’t repair it, but it seemed a fair bet that he would know the best mechanics and could recommend a garage. The same for when I needed a rental while my car was in the shop. (When I went to pick up the rental, the clerk and I started chatting, and he told me that they had re-programmed the caller ID so that it displayed “Harold” when a call from a particular pay phone came in.)

  The extra cash I was saving was adding up, and I decided to embark on the stock market. Harold knew what was piping and what was about to burst.

  When a neighbor’s dog got loose and drowned in my uncovered pool (installed courtesy of a favorable market return), the neighbor tried to sue me. I went to Harold. Quoting the state’s revised code from memory, with sizable reductions in the jargon, he coached me on what to say. My neighbor decided to look elsewhere for a fight.

  I’m not sure why, but when I started dating Mary, I went to Harold. Not directly, of course. I took him out for a bite to eat, and let it come up in conversation.

  “Mary who?”

  “Crick. Why?”

  “She used to work at the Eastwoods Club?”
Harold gestured with a lettuce leaf on the end of his dessert fork.

  “Yeah, that’s how I met her.”

  “What the hell were you doing there?” Harold asked.

  “I took up golf.”

  “Ah.”

  I waited.

  “So?” I finally asked. “Do you know her somehow?”

  “Yeah.”

  That was all.

  “Y’ ever read Kerouac?” Harold asked. “Sick puppy. But could play a typewriter like Beethoven on a concert grand.”

  #

  When I decided she was the one, I went back. After some preliminary discussion of Hemmingway, the Japanese economy, copyright law, and shrimp bouillabaisse (I had, to my own surprise, started studying at night in order to keep up during these talks), I asked Harold.

  “Don’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Don’t.”

  #

  I did. We were married in a chapel, with spotless surroundings, music, candles, flowers, and all the trimmings, by a soulless minister who droned on in a nasalic warble. It felt makeshift and hackneyed. It felt fake.