The Volunteer

by Salvatore Scibona

  “I’ll be a suck-egg mule,” Lorch said. “What did you think I was going to do all this time, poison you?”

  “Do you have a piece of candy?” Tilly asked.

  The portal began to swim about him. The floor tiles and the mosaic tiles of the bench swam with it. A Phantom fighter-bomber approached the perimeter of the town. Its roar ascended in volume and frequency. Lorch did not appear to hear it. It was the roar of a passing Phantom, except the sound didn’t abate. It reached a screeching peak and stayed there as though Tilly had been plucked up and carried beside the engines of the aircraft. He knew he was falling the moment before he fell.

  * * *

  • • •

  WHEN HE CAME TO, Lorch was trying to push the spout of a carton of mango-flavored coconut water between his lips. Tilly coughed.

  “Don’t breathe it, Hawkeye; swallow it. You aren’t allowed to choke to death until I get a secondary beneficiary out of you. Siri, ask Gloria to get Doctor Beavers on the line.” The phone dinged twice and said it was calling Gloria Pacheco before Tilly swallowed the sweet liquid and passed out again.

  When Tilly came to the second time, Lorch said, “Don’t be embarrassed. Glycemic issues are the plague of our times. All empires in decline are alike. Some lay the fault for the end of Rome at the feet of the homosexuals. I blame diet. The islets of Langerhans of a great nation can only tolerate so much domination of trade routes before the homeland is swimming in sugar. I was diabetic myself for a while there. Then I went paleo and licked it. I’m very strict these days. Sit up now and tell me how you been keeping. Lacking the clearance I once had, I really don’t know. The internet’s better than any recon outfit we ever used anyway. I only had to ask Siri to ask Gloria to do a LexisNexis search, and she brought up some of your condo docs on my phone. Look at that—snow. Don’t try to stand up till I get back.”

  He returned with a plate of crackers and two polyester blankets. Snow was accumulating on the pea gravel of the courtyard. Where it fell on the pathway flagstones it vanished as though it had never been. Tilly sat slack limbed in an iron chair. Lorch threw a blanket over him and tucked it around his sides leaving the arms and hands exposed. He put the plate of crackers in Tilly’s lap and wrapped the other blanket about his own shoulders like a serape and watched the snow.

  The crackers had green chile baked into them.

  “Remember when we could still smoke?” Lorch said. “God, I loved smoking in the snow. Yankees don’t get it about snow. My grandkids used to bitch about the shoveling when we all lived up in Stamford. I said, ‘It’s snow. Can you believe it? How can you all look away from it even for a minute?’ The attitude wasn’t their fault. Snow was normal to them as groceries bought on the Visa card. I’m just grateful some notions of scarcity I developed in childhood have persisted despite the riches of later life. You know what I mean? I always pegged you that way, loyal to your cash-poor youth. I reckoned you were living off whatever you made and didn’t want to crack your nut until you absolutely had to. Course, you might have been politer about telling me so.”

  The flags were cold enough now that the snow grew up on them. Tilly might have lain down under the rumpled snow and slept.

  “Will you let me tell you a little about the career of your assets? You understand after a while I began to doubt I’d ever see this day—your distribution horizon was effectively never, which allowed a management structure of very long-term growth and freed you up for some exposures to risk that might otherwise have been a little alarming. You got plumb near cleaned out twice before I accepted the gospel of diversification. Once was with Hill Country oil fields. The second was an airline venture that never—well, it never flew its planes. I don’t apologize in this business, but when it looked as if Eastern and Pan Am were going under I saw opportunity among the wreckage. Like everybody else, you recovered in the middle Greenspan period. You made some good trades, you made some bad trades. But all in all, I want to compliment your nerve.”

  The cracker shattered in Tilly’s teeth.

  “One regret—I didn’t see Big Pharma coming. Why didn’t I notice all the fancy new illnesses my children were being diagnosed with?” He took off his glasses and dabbed a finger at the inside corner of his eye and looked at the fingertip. He put his glasses back on. “They were too close to me. I hope you don’t mind the principles are commingled. The land sale proceeds and the profit share on your operation that you never let us pay you all went into one pot.”

  Tilly ate another cracker. His delirium was lifting. He said, “I used to wonder why you didn’t keep that money for yourself.”

  “Don’t think I wasn’t tempted. But I look at the name of the legal instrument by which I have custody of these assets and I see a word derived from the Old Norse traust. This word has traveled across icy seas and barbarous tongues losing only a single letter. It has passed many times from the conqueror to the conquered who in time became the new conqueror, but it has kept its meaning unchanged. I had no place undermining two thousand years of history. Trust is trust.”

  Gloria brought chamomile tea in steaming earthenware mugs. “Beavers sent a text,” she said bashfully. “It said Take him to the hospital, di—”

  “That’s all right.”

  “Take him to the hospital, dickweed. Here, look.”

  “That’s all right. He’s been calling me that since junior high school.”

  “Do I phone for an ambulance, Mr. Lorch?”

  “Why don’t you run get us each a couple of chicken tacos? How’s that, Sergeant?”

  “Red or green?” the girl asked.

  Lorch said, “Red.”

  Tilly said, “Green.”

  After she went away, Lorch said, “I started worrying for you about four years ago. I said to myself, Think of his age. He’ll probably break down sometime soon and put a couple of kids through college. So I reined you back. Obama was probably going to win the primary. People would ask me, ‘Percy, are you in gold yet with this Obama coming?’ You know what I said? I said, ‘Hell no, I’m not afraid.’ I said, ‘Yes we can.’ Then I said to myself, But Lorch, are you really going to make ole Tilly the victim of your hopefulness? I just didn’t think Obama was good for you. I had a feeling. Too bad I didn’t have the same feeling about my own assets. You sold a lot in early 2008. You paid your capital gains. Then he actually won the nomination, and I listened to that speech at the football stadium in Denver and I got a little paranoid for you. You know I don’t have a racist hair, you know that, but I know my people and I thought, We are not going to feel comfortable with this man at the till. For myself, I was confident; for you, I feared. So you shorted the market broadly—just in time for the follies of September.

  “Don’t worry about me, I’ve recovered since the crisis. Everybody with any patience has already recovered. You, however, had nothing to recover from. You walked to school downhill both ways in sunshine. Since 2009 you’ve taken a special interest in emerging markets, especially India, but at your age you’re sick of paying the fees of actively managed funds; you’ve taken diversification to its logical extreme and you’ve put most of your assets into index funds, except for your bond exposure, which is mostly in individual T-bills you plan to hold to maturity. You believe in the credit of your government.”

  “What kind of paleo is this where you get to have tacos?” Tilly asked.

  “Mine will come in a dehydrated crisp flaxseed product. No cheese, no guac.”

  “What will mine come in?”

  “White corn, soft shell. I would not recommend that you immediately sell anything in the portfolio once we transfer the trust to your name. Get to know your assets before you decide which of them to liquidate and in what order. Each has its own charm, you’ll find. Except within the index funds, you’re totally out of defense and security. We’ve already hit peak security, in my judgment. It isn’t undergoing the disruptions anymor
e that lead industries into ruin or into convulsions of growth. I believe security is heading into a refractory period until the next era of world-shaking terror, which may be a long way off. For now it still appears to be growing, but that appearance comes mostly from the forward momentum it experienced over the last decade.

  “An entrepreneur with a taste for history instead seeks out industries that seem to have been long asleep, in enervated states of technological drift. Think of men’s formal wear, bottled ketchup. Nothing important has changed there in a hundred years. The technology has become invisible, unquestionable, as though discovered not invented, closed to change. But at any given time, a few of these sectors are really waiting on the cusp of the historical event or technological breakthrough that will change everything forever for everybody. Hence my new project here. Will you let me tell you about it?”

  Clumps of snow fell with uncanny slowness through the windless peace of the courtyard. Snow on the stone benches and the yucca in the rock garden. The bittersweet ionized air of snowfall on the desert.

  “Some don’t welcome the technological change the entrepreneur seeks. What he calls drift, they call peace. I understand. What was the matter with the old TV remote control? How have all these infernal new buttons improved the state of the man on his throne? This man believes he can recede into a distant continent of self and prosper there. But he has mistaken the status quo for a state of nature. He doesn’t recognize that cycles of devastation are necessary to continuing life. Many species of conifer have cones that hold their seeds in resin so dense they can only be released to the wind under conditions of fire. The manzanita shrub and the jack pine are two examples. The entrepreneur is not the forest fire. He is the wind that spreads the seed on the ash-black and newly fertile ground. Would you like to know what I believe will be the next old industry on the cusp of breathtaking change?”

  Tilly had eaten two crackers and decided to eat no more of them.

  “It’s a new old industry, as these matters often are. Telephony was asleep for decades—now look how you carry the computing power of a thousand Reagan-era mainframes in your pocket and you quaintly call this thing your ‘phone,’ as if it were an unexceptional household object. I’ll tell you what I see.

  “I see a moment when the requisite technologies will shortly converge for a new final frontier. In a few years all the men who walked on the moon will be dead. The future of space would seem to be a thing of the past. But I believe now is the moment when capital invested in the right way can perform its catalytic magic. And here is the place to do it. I mean New Mexico. The convergence here of the world’s best rocket-propulsion minds together with the best nuclear engineering know-how. They already live right here on the Interstate Twenty-five corridor from Los Alamos through Socorro and down to Las Cruces. I am not alone in my belief. State and local authorities are right now nearing completion on a two-hundred-million-dollar facility, a spaceport, twenty miles south of Truth or Consequences. It is a breathtaking piece of desert infrastructure. It makes use of thermal labyrinth earth tubes to precondition air for passive cooling and heating. Its roof is clad in ethylene propylene diene terpolymer. From the air it resembles a giant orchid in earth tones. My colleagues in the public sector and my partners in the private sector believe we have arrived at the sweet spot in history, the inflection point. I see from your gleaming eye that you hope I’m not referring to mere low-orbit tourism. You might even be wondering how you might invest your own resources at this crucial time if you’re unexcited by the slow projected growth of the fixed income products in your portfolio. It’s only natural that entrepreneurs and not governments should take the lead now. Think of the joint-stock investors back in England who formed the Virginia Company and got Jamestown going in 1607. The income potential of this new project is going to seem obvious the moment I tell you about it.

  “I am speaking, of course, of the private-sector plan to construct one thousand nuclear-powered, oxygen- and greenhouse gas–producing mineral furnaces to create, in a few short years, a heat-trapping and breathable atmosphere conducive to comfortable and happy human life on the planet Mars.”

  “Whatever happened to Van Aken?” Tilly asked.

  “Arthur retired. But listen—”

  “He was already retired when we met.”

  “That was from the army. A while after your operation, he retired also from the shop.”

  “I always thought deep down you had a code,” Tilly said.

  “Thank you. Arthur married finally, a mining executive from Hong Kong. I liked her right away. She was in her seventies, but if you asked her what was so special about the carbonatite deposits in Tanzania she turned back into a Chinese schoolgirl infatuated with rock formations. Right before he died, I visited the two of them at the golf course where they lived on Bodega Bay in California. Deer were climbing all over the slopes on shore; no one was allowed to hunt them. Arthur was very calmly obsessed with lobbying the housing association to let him build an electric fence, to keep the deer out of his wife’s roses. It seemed clear he was taking a benzodiazepine. That made me sad. He was in all the nontrivial respects a great man. He helped me out when my son was going through his teenage moods and I felt I had no one else to call. You know, the indifference to schoolwork and the thousand-yard stare like his mother and I were the biggest assholes in Virginia. It passed, thank God. Arthur said it would, but I didn’t know it. I miss Arthur every day. Let’s get back to Mars.”

  Tilly said, “Do you remember a man named Egon Hausmann?”

  Lorch looked at him. “Funny way of asking that question.”

  “Was that his real name?”

  “I know for a fact that was his name at birth.”

  “Arthur killed him.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “I walked Arthur into the house where this old man was living. I thought, They’re just going to squeeze him for information. I was lying, but only to myself. Then Arthur shot him. He died, right? I didn’t go back to look.”

  “Why are you talking like this? I don’t like your dreamy tone.”

  “There was a girl who took care of him. She used to watch the boys play basketball. Always neat. Sometimes a little notebook in her hand. I talked to her maybe three times. I don’t know if you remember, I told her Arthur was a doctor who’d check the old man out. Another little lie I hardly noticed. Did Arthur ever tell you what happened? After he shot the old man, the girl tried to stop Arthur from leaving the house. What did she think she was doing? Arthur shot her in the heart.”

  “Eat another cracker,” Lorch said, shoving the box at him.

  “I’d seen people get killed before,” Tilly said. “Even up close like that. Sometimes I had a hand in it. I didn’t know they’d go on living in my mind. Every year they’re more alive.”

  Lorch’s mouth opened. For once no words came out. He was recalculating his position. Tilly’s implication that he might be informing Lorch of operational details that Lorch probably already knew seemed to irritate his vanity; however, to challenge Tilly would be to admit knowledge. Lorch glanced behind himself over either shoulder. His phone rang, a jingle of computerized wind chimes in his jacket pocket, which he ignored. “If you have the impression that you were misled in your dealings with Arthur, I’m sorry.”

  “My dealings with Arthur? That’s slithery, even for you. Did Hausmann even do anything wrong?”

  Lorch asked, “Are you wearing a recording device?”

  “I’ve had a long time to think about this,” Tilly said. “I think you were telling the truth about one thing at least. You don’t know who your ultimate customer was or what he had against Hausmann, and you’d never want to find out. Your whole operation depended on you not asking who was moving you around or why. And because none of us is ever going to know, our own hands are sort of clean. I shot people in Vietnam and I don’t even know how many. I never saw them cl
ose. I didn’t know what any of it was for. I didn’t ask.

  “But some part of me must have known you’d kill that old man. Why take that kind of trouble over a person unless you mean to kill him? I said to myself I didn’t know what was happening, but I told the girl to get into the kitchen. Why did I do that if I didn’t think she could get hurt? When Arthur was leaving, she came out in the hall. My whole body started to twitch. I had this impulse to get in front of her or throw her out of the way. But I resisted it. I stood there telling myself, I don’t know what’s happening. That was another lie. I knew enough to stop my hands and feet from doing what they were trying to do.”

  Lorch’s phone had quit ringing. He put his hand to his breast pocket as if to reassure himself the phone was still there. He said, “Investigations of the motives of ultimate customers in their commissioning of intelligence products were not encouraged by protocols. Is there a bug in my phone?”

  “This is where your code comes in. I could never figure out why you wouldn’t stop hassling me to take that money. I think I understand now. Your code says if we’re all getting paid then there’s no blood on your hands. The money cleans it all by magic.”

  Lorch rewrapped himself in the blanket, staring with flushed deliberation at his stitched and inlaid boots. “What I can tell you is that Hausmann, in his career, while engaged in a field of operations not unrelated to ours, would have committed offenses that triggered internal protocols of moral balance. Were our shared field of operations within an overt jurisdiction, Hausmann’s offenses would have to have been adjudicated by people who could not possibly have comprehended the sensitivity of the operations in which we were routinely employed.”

  “You think if you keep talking, you won’t have to hear what happens in your mind,” Tilly said.