by Evan Dara
Mm, Theodore said. It’s a nice break for us. You know, get in on that old ground floor …
And it may involve more, Bud said. It seems as if the owner’s grooming us to become his faces. You know, the company’s public image, their Ben and their Jerry, if, when, that need arises …
Wouldn’t that be a dream, Theodore said …
But we prefer not to think about it, Bud said. You know, why get ahead of things. In the now, we just stay glad for what’s already coming our way …
Exactly, Theodore said. It lets us keep up with the essentials. Well, some of the essentials …
Mm, Bud said, and put his hands on the table. He looked around the restaurant, then returned to focus. But what we really want, most of all, he said, is to get back to Tibet …
Amen, Theodore said …
Yeah, Bud said. Really gets under your skin. So beautiful. The definition of magical. And there’s so much work to be done there. We feel this deeply …
Very deeply, Theodore said …
So now, recently, we’re working on a plan to guide visitors there, Bud said. You know, to lead small groups of the right-minded. We just want to show folks this amazement, and what’s going on in the region. For instance, a few of the caretaker monks at the Potala Palace have been allowed to put on ceremonial robes again. Isn’t that gorgeous? And we just read that another monastery has reopened. Outstanding! That brings the number to 109, from only eight in 1978. In fact, in the Gaden monastery, which has been the hub of the great, great Gelugpa lineage since 1409, they now have 169 monks! And that in Southern India! Who could believe that any of them would have gotten there from the Lhasa Valley. That’s fully two percent – better than two – of the 7,000 monks that lived in the original complex! Those guys didn’t let the smoke and the rubble get in their way. And we also read that immigration to Tibet seems to be leveling off – and a report came out that literacy has officially risen to thirty percent! In fact, the number of children being given good, well-grounded educations in China is up to around 10,000 a year … !
So, yeah, the sky is returning to heaven, Bud continued. And we want to help show it off, all the colors and shine. It’s good to bring in foreign currency, and for travelers the trip has become substantially easier. The Dunya restaurant, which is right there in the middle of Lhasa, now serves salami pizza. And you can pay for it with cash you get from an ATM around the corner at the Bank of China! You want a kick? Just go up to the photo studio they’ve installed at the top of the Potala Palace and get your picture taken in a real Maoist uniform – one of the very same sacred robes that the army wore when it invaded in the ’50s! And now, even so far away, no one has to feel cut off – there are more satellite dishes than prayer flags fluttering above Lhasa the good. Roof of the world indeed … !
So that’s the deep dream, Bud said. And we’re moving on it, at least with the resources we still have. In fact – check this out – a few months ago we started studying Mandarin. It’ll help with travel arrangements and visa requirements and such, and also let us chitchat with all the nice Han being ferried into the region. It’s fascinating to learn a tone language. Mandarin has four inflected tones and one neutral – talk about nuance! Same words different senses. Imposes meticulous attention …
Yeah, Theodore said. It’s really tricky. But, you know, what right-anything thing isn’t?
—And when all the music and foofaraw died down, and we could consider appetizers, Lincoln, well, he just went right over to John Nash and pumped his hand. And Nash was all like saying he’d been hoping they’d meet, and then like Lincoln’s saying he’d heard John’s bank does a lot of business in Mexico City, and then John’s saying—
—Oh, that closing was remarkable. It was a big four-bedroom, Gold Coast of course, and the escrow agent was late: tied up in the Kennedy Expressway madness. And the clients, a pediatrician and his second wife – well, they were just delighted, just brimming with delight, avid to just sit down and sign – and you could tell, you could just tell that part of their eagerness was that they wanted, they were looking for the kind of place that Lincoln might—
—You almost thought Dardan was going to ask him for an autograph. Lincoln walked into Dardan’s inner office, at which Dardan jumped up, and smiled brightly, and grabbed Lincoln’s hand, and said Pleasure. Dardan then brought him to an angle of couches, where a low-to-the-ground teak table held a tea service and a tray of butter cookies, and they sat, and Dardan asked him how John Nash was doing. And then Dardan said he had a confession to make: his wife knew Lincoln, had met him several times. But he couldn’t, sorry to say, mention her by name. A hidden cost of this business, Dardan said, and closed his eyes, and nodded his head …
Dardan asked Lincoln if he’d had a good Presidents’ Day, and the two gabbled for another few minutes. In time, Carter Dardan – maybe fifty, and plump at bottom, with thick hair springing from a side part and a Phi Beta Kappa key strung on a fob into his suit’s vest pocket – told about his background. Born in Deerfield, and grew up in a semidetached two streets away. All-Star catcher for the Colts – local Little League. College in Milwaukee, at Marquette, studying astronomy. (The instinct was already there, he said. From searching the skies to searching the streets.) A job out of school with Chicago PD, eventually running their records department, then launching Modus Ponens and Associates fourteen years ago because he had to go solo, had to be his own boss …
And the risk, praise God, has paid off, he said. Starting in two rooms on LaSalle Street, Modus Ponens is now the industry leader throughout the upper Midwest. Currently a staff of sixteen. List of clients long as your arm, if I could show it. But you would recognize ninety percent of the names. Easily ninety. So: What can we do for you?
—Quietly, Lincoln pulled an envelope from his jacket pocket, then withdrew from it two pictures. One was a snap of his extended family – parents and their siblings, Lincoln and his cousins – in sunhats and shirts, taken during a summer walk in Devonshire. The second was a shot just of Virginia Coons, dated 1968 on the rear. She was in her middle twenties then, and her features sang in Lincoln’s memory: the longish face, the ginger hair, the small but knuckly nose. Lincoln didn’t know the occasion for which this picture had been taken, but the foursquare, shoulders-up portrait did justice to the essentials: the hesitancy of her half-smile, the freightedness of her gaze. Hints, whisperings, of undercurrents. Lincoln asked Dardan if he would need copies.
—Dardan gave the photos to an assistant for scanning. This shouldn’t take long, Dardan then said. He looked at a fax that Lincoln had sent, and at notes he had made on a legal pad. We know your aunt was here, and that she stayed at least a few years, he said. We know the year she arrived, and her first address, and when she got married, and her husband’s name. That we know. I dream, of cases with so much data. Because all of it, every part of it, ramifies out, ramifies in so many directions that the leads become tripwires. Everybody leaves tracks, deposits spoor. They disappear; the spoor stays. They are forgotten, the spoor is forgotten, the spoor stays. This won’t take long …
He smiled and continued. You can’t help scratching the face of history, he said. This office has access to voting records, to utility-company files, telephone databases, a libraryful of streetmaps. We can get to DMV fiches, to hospital-admission documents, to CHA rolls, credit-card sheets, newspaper morgues, TRW records, police reviews – and that’s just the stuff we can tell you about. We’ll also do field probes – visits to neighborhoods, interviews. Nah, this’ll be a cinch. This shouldn’t take long. This is not an illegal alien, or a tax dodge, or an SRO moll. This is not an unemployed, or a shut-in. That said, you may not, of course, like what we find. But you’ll like that we found it …
Dardan put away his papers, and spoke terms. The agency’s fee was $1,500 a week, plus expenses, expenses to be filed monthly but itemized weekly. They’d also provide monthly printed reports on progress. If it took a month …
Dardan gave Lincoln h
is pager number if he wanted to get in touch.
—Lincoln signed on the spot. Hey: he’s not the kind of guy to shillyshally. He arranged for weekly transfers to be made every Monday, starting February 26th, from his account. From one of his accounts.
—Oh, just walking up those steps – no, there aren’t many of them, but they extend so wide, they’re so very lengthy and sleek – and then passing inwards through the shaded arcade … My dear, it still halts the breath. The frisson that accompanies first evenings at the Institute is something I always look forward to – and for years now, for years. That Thursday night was the member’s preview for the Parmiganino show, a big do years in the works, with loans from Vienna and Arezzo and the Accademia in Venice, the English crown, the Alte Pinakothek, and certainly many others. Fully half the One Hundred was there – Gregor Meese, Wilhemina Barret, Judy Hobby in a plunging backless dress, just so many – and everyone was terribly taken by the show, all the moody elongations and exaggerations that gave so much to grace, the stunning self-portait. Afterwards, in the reception hall, a string trio played, and the canapés were exceptionally light and lovely, the champagne fine …
And there was more: While the musicians paused, a professor from the University went up to the performance space and read poetry – entirely marvelous. And after the professor had taken his bows, Lincoln’s girlfriend was coaxed up to the stage to share in the kudos. It seems she had organized our soirée, and, under gales of applause, she charmed just everyone with her demureness and shy smile. Her extraordinary beauty, too: Cristina is an assistant curator in the Institute’s department of drawings and prints, and her honey-colored skin, and exceptional slenderness, and fine, night-fire eyes bespoke the benefits of a European upbringing. She was born near Cortona, I understand, and spoke four languages. How she’d come to Chicago I don’t know, but her loveliness was such that one’s head turned. Not to put too fine a point upon it, but I was desirous of her, frankly so, I was desirous to touch her, to be with her, to lick her, I wanted, quite keenly, to have her, to fuck her, I wanted to fuck her very, very badly.
—For me, the zing of Auran was in them hands, if you know what I mean. I mean, wherever she was – which means wherever Lincoln was – she’d just stand there, just bang there, right by him, quietly, and super-patiently, with her hands held behind her back. And whenever Lincoln needed anything, she’d have it for him like immediately – sometimes without him even saying anything, it seemed. Pens, business cards, stuff like that, pieces of paper, a napkin, like a palm pilot ’n shit – she’d just have it, she’d pull it out from somewhere, like she was just conjuring it up behind her back with them hidden hands. Once, I saw she offered her back when Lincoln needed a surface to write on. I mean, the girl bent down. But Lincoln, you know, he just moved to like a table that was there …
I liked her. She had this sweet acorn-shaped face, and she was always trying new stuff with her hair – like one time tinted and held back by like a comb, which let off this little flappy pony – and shit did she wear nice perfume. Can smell it now. Hm. That shit was grrrr.
—Did Lincoln mind letting go of his job? Well, let’s think about that. I trust he regretted parting with some of the people. He often said he enjoyed his colleagues. He mentioned one officegirl, Tara, frequently. But he wasn’t close with her. I also believe he rued losing the flexibility. That is, the flexible hours. How little he had to be in the office. But did he regret leaving the position? Even before he got his license? I trust you’re joking.
—No, I didn’t know the salary. But you could imagine. You could just imagine.
—What I do know is that there was an elegant, elegant reception held in his honor over at the Palmer House, with several dozen people from the bank, and a wonderful buffet, and a jazz trio tossing tunes from a fakebook, and a hostess up front with the guest list whose telephone number I really wish I’d gotten, and Auran was there, really lighting up the place, smiling so proudly, and all the big big FirstCentral brass stopping in and shaking Lincoln’s hand, all of them making him feel welcome, and then Lincoln stepped under an arc lamp in the center of the floor – and forks tinked glasses, and the musicians stopped playing, and everyone shushed – and he smiled and said it was a little awkward for him, as the bank’s new spokesman, to find himself speechless, but that he had been rendered such by all these fine people’s great graciousness and generosity, and so he proposed to just lift a glass, etc., etc., and he held up champagne whose sparkle-bubbles caught the light, and everyone laughed, and everyone loved it, and Lincoln bowed, and the guy was just so winning that I didn’t care that I hadn’t copped that hostess’s number.
—No: vihDAHky, vihDAHky, the voice on the cell phone said: Touvil Vidaky. We’ve spoken before, a few times maybe, maybe twice. But the pronunciation, the pronunciation, you gotta get that right, make my Lithuanian pop-pop happy …
It was that funny fact-checker from the Sun-Times. Lincoln smiled. The fact-checker charged on …
Nice to say hello again. So: if you have a moment, would you just confirm that you were at Ambria last night? For the WTTW event? For the whole evening? And did Sotelino prepare a special menu? And with avocado mousseline? And was Jacqueline Kerr there? And was she wearing a diamond bracelet on top of her cast? And your girlfriend. Last time you told me her name is Shelly. Ah. Now her name is Birgit. Very good. Thank you!
—Did he buy used? Of course not. Did he rent? Of course not. Did he settle for what his budget could easily handle? Saab? Audi? Volvo? Of course not. It was Beemer, Beemer, BMW, all the way …
Did he go for the 3 series? Stop it. The 5 series? The 530, with 225 hp? No. The 540i – 325 horses. Did he get the GPS navigation, the auto-leveling xenon headlamps? Of course he did. Did he get the extra-adjustable comfort seats (20 ways, not 12), the heated seats, the heated steering wheel? The parking-distance control, the emergency call system?
Did he get anything less than exactly what he wanted … ?
Come on. It’s Linc—
—Birgit slips velour fingers between Lincoln’s own. They are walking past a launderette on West Eugenie Street, 11:20 PM, a silvery Thursday. And Birgit – Patti Hansen enhanced; Lee Remick remixed. And Birgit – granddaughter of Hugh Carey, rainbarrel for all the transit money. She stops. And Birgit:
Tell me you don’t love me … just tell me that … because that’s the only way I’ll fuck you … that I’ll continue to fuck you … tell me you’re just leading me on … just doing what you have to, to get me to shove you my cunt … I’ll go down on you this instant if you tell me how deeply you scorn me … that’s the only way it’ll happen again … the only … because I need to test my love for you, to see if it’s as strong as it feels … love that liquefies, that keeps me bathed in inner tears … love so strong I have to taunt it, to harrow it, to see if it holds up, if it holds forth … to confirm what I can not believe … that it’s strong enough to shunt your assaults … so I need to know I can’t trust you … that the only loving one is me … that you really are unfeeling, and abusing … because I will love enough for two … mine will fill the field containing us, and prove my love is enough for both of us, both of … then you will feel it too, you will feel my love crowding into your plain … and then you will become possessive of your plain, jealous of your vacant plain, you will feel it being wrenched away … and then, threatened, you will fill it with the love that I know, I know is there.
—Eet’s eediopathic. Unknown cause. Unknown etiology. Symptoms without sources. Eet does not appear harmful. You have a cough. I advise you not to think about eet. Go on weeth leeving. I can keep testing if you like. But my prescreeption is forget about eet. I can keep testing if you like …
Ninety-eight percent of all cases that walk een you know as soon as they walk een. We ail the same. The other two percent you refer …
Actually, I don’t like eediopathic, comme diagnosis. Eet’s not accurate. Eet’s actually eeatrogenic. Like all disorders. Whole world ees hospit
al.
—Auran had set the meeting up, Auran knew the address, Auran drove. That gal is nothing if not a blooming marvel of efficiency.
Certainly Lincoln had calls to take care of – he had made a very well-received presentation to the Central Illinois Banking Commission that afternoon, winning them over to disability-insurance deregulation, and he certainly wanted to follow up, with thank-you’s and reminders and such – so Auran gave him time to use his cell phone. Besides, she had been to the Yale club before, so she knew the threads and dodges of rush hour. You see what I mean: efficiency.
—They stepped up the carpeted stairway to the second-floor salon. Its walls of carved darkwoods tonied the room’s clusters of bolster-backed chairs, its tea-service tables. Stained-glass windows, hued with insignias, an Elizabethan bestiary and a coat of arms, cast wines and ambers from the streetward wall. Bookchests glowed with gilt spines. A newspaper rack dripped information from long, parallel poles. The poles, split and cinched by chokers at one end, pinched the midriffs of the papers. Anything near a seam or a staple fell into dark, unferretable unreadability.
—Auran spotted a black-haired woman seated mid-wall: smiles lit; forefingers flared. She led Lincoln to the woman’s small table; the woman shook Lincoln’s hand, Auran’s; the three sat. A suited gentleman hovered, stepped; took orders for espresso …
The woman’s name was Ilene G. Speranza. Near 35, her eyes were wide, her chin upticked, sharp. Her torso was thin, thin-boned, unfleshed; candlestick arms ran from short, beige sleeves. She wore her hair in flat sheets, jaw-length; and parted on one side. But there was a shadedness to Ilene, and deliberateness, too: she moved in small movements; if at all …
Are you a fan of tears?, Speranza said. Marvelous instruments. And versatile too. Do you know they differ? Not yours and mine. Those are the same. But among tears themselves. Their chemical composition. Tears of joy have a different chemical make-up than the other tears. Different protein content. Different manganese. Across all of us. Is that not marvelous … ?