The Easy Chain

by Evan Dara

  But still waiting. Waiting for something from L, B. So, finally, called. Didn’t want to wait any more. Didn’t care. They would have to understand. It was October! So called Nigel Pitt’s office. Throat creaking. Heart tomming. Told name, put on hold. Waiting again! Then passed to someone, Carl Breech, I think. Friendly, talks baritone smoothness. Says they’d been meaning to call me, thanks for the call. Explains they’d had a few changeabouts in young adult. That the assistant editor who’d been assigned my book had left. So delays, settling in, new broom, new fall roster, revised list, word puffs. But nice. And assurances I hadn’t been, quote, forgotten. That they’d be in touch, that things would be moving forward, and thank you, and thank you, and …

  And I thought what. What does that mean? What …

  So waited again. And waited more. And waited til some distant Thursday afternoon months on and called and could only leave a message. Which – unreturned …

  And waiting. And calling back. And not in. And not in. But then calling and getting an assistant, an assistant who identifies himself as DL. Who takes a message – and now it’s fourteen months! – and I get it. I get it …

  They’re right. The thing shouldn’t come out. Shouldn’t. Absolutely no. Mustn’t. Terrible. It’s terrible. No one should be subjected to it …

  No one. And I have to make sure this happens – i.e., doesn’t happen. So I check. And check further. And then call. And this time they come to the phone. They knew: they came to the phone. Yes, they are planning to put the thing out. This they say. But they have no obligation to, they say. And no deadline to. And – and, further, no rights revert, ever. Contract like for a movie script. Becoming standard in the book-biz …

  In other words: they own it. They paid, it’s theirs. Including all rights of exploitation …

  And then: cordial hangup …

  Hey: why not? Why the hell not … ?

  And again: I get it …

  But no. No crying. No tears. None …

  So here. Looking for investors. To buy back. To make sure it never comes out. I must make sure the thing never comes out …

  But, um, Auran said. I mean, it doesn’t seem like you have to worry about—

  I know, Speranza said. But I want to be the one not to put it out. That’s my charge. That it’s never seen. By anyone. Thank God I realized this. Before they didn’t put it out …

  But now broke. Can’t buy it back on my own. So offering a percentage of the idea. The glasses. Kill the book, get the content. The technology is on the way. Only wrote the thing to establish a claim on the idea. Why else would anyone do anything like this … ? Think that if it helps …

  Why do you think they were … ?

  I know. What you’re wondering. Can’t ask Michael, Mr. big intern. Over. Big over. Months ago. Yeah. No more talk about a baby …

  So it’s good. It’s an opportunity. For anyone who hasn’t been ground down to where they can only see the—

  I mean, why do you think I set it in Scotland? Everybody knows about those people. First sell you the poison. Then sell you the treatment. Created the modern template …

  So, know any potential investors?, Speranza said. Anyone at all I can talk to about this?

  —She got up, put her business card on the table, and walked away, sidestepping waiters, scratching her wrist, pushing deep through the diffusely-lit, woodpaneled club.

  —And oh was there a reception at Missy Browne’s, kind of a housetechno-Vietnamese thing, and just a super another given by Kim Flanders at Kiki’s Bistro, and we were having the first break in the cold, killer this year, and then at Spiaggia, when Martin Schuston was having a for his—

  —The visit, the procedure went relatively quickly. But Lincoln was magnificent, really magnif—

  —And what came about was that Lincoln – bless him, you know, amaze – he insisted on tests—

  —They began with a basic psychomotor examination, then moved to linguistic/cognitive analysis. It didn’t take long. Dr. Schreber was calm, methodical, advancing without pause. A short, lean man in a not-unrumpled lab coat, Dr. Schreber must have been near to 60, with wavy, chantilly-white hair and gold, square-frame glasses …

  Speaking, he revealed the warm Bern/Jura libre polarities of his Swiss upbringing. He used standard Collingsworth procedures: He asked Lincoln to bring the ends of his fingers together, at arm’s length. He asked Lincoln to follow a baton-tip with his eyes, as the doctor moved it towards and from Lincoln’s forehead. He scratched the bottom of Lincoln’s left foot, ball to heel, with the same baton. Those kinds of things …

  Then followed, in an adjacent room, simple associative tests. Dr. Schreber had Lincoln sit at a small formica-topped table, then sat facing him. Prompts came on cards turned over by Lincoln, then spoken by the doctor. When finished, the two bandied simplicities, before Dr. Schreber asked Lincoln to take a seat in the waiting room. He was called into the doctor’s private office just a few minutes later …

  Happily, no bloodwork will be needed, Dr. Schreber said from behind his modest gray desk, as Lincoln sat in front of him. This is good, of course, yes … ?

  Lincoln heartily agreed …

  But you were right to come in, the doctor said. Dr. Derapée was correct to make the referral …

  Lincoln sat back in his seat …

  At the moment, Dr. Schreber continued, while entering points of data into his desktop, you are exhibiting much symptomatology associated with what is still known, in certain corners of the literature, yes?, as Zinkofsky’s Syndrome. Mine is still only a hypothesis, but reasonable confidence is there …

  Dr. Schreber looked up. But there is not to fear, he said. Zinkofsky’s, as it has come to us, is one of a range of new, socially-determined emergent disorders, just now knowing nosology. Sometimes called the kid brother to Cotard’s disease, Zinkofsky’s is among a breed of psychoacoustic maladies, seemingly on the rise in North America for ach, the last fifteen years?, that are beginning to enter the journals. More particularly, Zinkofsky’s is a benign dysfunction of the semanto-neurological system, thought to be triggered by exquisite sensitivity to social nuance …

  But you must know what I’m talking about, he went on. That shimmy you feel in your throat, correct?, the chirping at the rear of your tongue, back where the bitterness is. And this causing the spasmistic releases you were talking about. It is all part of the autonomic nervous system, and quite incapable of being controlled. It is, in its way, sneezelike, yes?, in its violence, its unforeseeable onset …

  But here, he continued, in Zinkofsky’s, the irritant isn’t dust or pollen, or viral invasion, but disequilibrium. Semantic disequilibrium, in fact, compromises of or violences to veracity. Zinkofsky’s Syndrome, Mr. Selwyn, has as its principal symptom a violent and reciprocal discharge when presented with certain orders of untruth. Mr. Selwyn, it seems you have become allergic to lying. And when exposed to the allergen, your system reacts – or compensates, hm? – by discharging a reciprocal nonveracity. Another lie, yeh—?

  “Wait,” Lincoln said. “Stop. You’re kidding me.”

  —Dr. Schreber got up from behind his desk. Why would I do that?, he said.

  —And, like, Lincoln, man, he’s so great, he was like so amazing when—

  —Here, the doctor said, and rounded the desk towards him.

  —Just stunning, you know, jaw-droppingly the best—

  —The doctor walked to Lincoln, and showed him a sheet of paper lined with jottings …

  My nurse took notes during our conversation, Dr. Schreber said. Alas, from behind the Judas glass. I am sorry not to have told you. We do this. Purely routine. But here. Let us look …

  The doctor read aloud from the page, while moving his index finger down, line by line … :

  Essayer presents: So, Mr. Selwyn. This is a fairly simple procedure …

  Subject presents: Ready …

  Essayer presents: OK. I’ll be checking for a condition we understand well …

 
; Subject presents: I want to know everything about it …

  Essayer presents: As you should. Happily, there are no real long-term implications …

  Subject presents: I’m not scared at all …

  Essayer presents: Good. Even so, I am here to help you …

  Subject presents: You know, it’s just terrible how doctors’ livelihoods have been decimated by the HMO’s …

  Essayer presents: Yes. Still, I’m sorry your distress led you to come to my office …

  Subject presents: Love that pocket guard …

  So – yes?, Dr. Schreber said, walking back to his desk. The typical allergic sequence. Exposure to the allergen, then related compensatory reaction. Here occasioned consecutively. And expulsively. Entirely answers the classical model …

  What we have then, so, is a species of involuntary speech, the doctor said, close to Perry-Gore’s disease and perhaps akin to Tourette, though some observers contend that Zinkofsky’s involves the real obscenity. It is, in a way, a kind of reverse homeopathic response, the body’s own homologous medicine, an expectorant protection, as noted before, for exceptional, even Proustian sensitivity. Or, as Lebensluge has put it, an auto-unimmune disorder …

  And the language thus produced – arriving so magically, so automatically … Some of the afflicted have been known to describe the effect as inspiration. Even divine in origin, a divine wind …

  Why are certain individuals thus beset?, Dr. Schreber continued. This remains a mystery – why particular resistance systems become, what?, overloaded unto toxicity. The literature seems to indicate the necessity of some predisposition, some prior psychic susceptibility or emotional tillage. But the phenomenon is also gaining extra-personally. In facticity, the rising incidence of Zinkofsky’s in North America led one Avram Pait to his hypothesis, which sees a relationship in the expansion of Zinkofsky’s to our current meta-Greshamic situation, where market values are driving all other human values out of circulation, with the attendant mental precipitates – our ongoing construction of Greater Marketania, as Reinbert Egmunt describes it. The progressive development of this economonoculture, to sum E.I.O. Wilson, brings out all kinds of recessives, and encourages them to mutate and multiply, at the same time as it leaves the field open to whole ranges of possibly devastational new predators – market theology hatches its own Beelzebubbi, yes? On the individual level – for exampling, you – the fallout is no less significant. Again, I think Pait. In his view, every marketplace exchange is based on fundamental parallel disingenuousnesses, with each party believing that, all factors taken into account, the present value of his offering is less than the value of what is to be received. Otherwise, why to do this, yes? Thus, every agent in an exchange is endeavoring to catch, or best, every other agent in the exchange, whether individually or in combination. All are, all the time, working perceived advantage, and we have grown in wisdom to where we understand this to be the model for all human interaction, not only within the economic sphere – to such point that Kristeva has called it the Hobbesian reconquest. Thus did Kristeva name her trotty little housepet Pluto, dog of money and death. So, locked into a system of mutually assured deception, the spike in Zinkof’s may be consequenced. Culturally, the reaction – physically speaking now – may have hit critical mass. Or, if you prefer, hypocritical mass …

  Thus, the malady claims ever more fellow-travelers, Dr. Schreber said. Outbreaks, statistically improbable upflares of infection, have been reported far beyond these latitudes, in London, in Hong Kong, in Dubai, in Dublin, in Beijing and Guernsey and Bangalore. Though the Z-bearers themselves are generally anosagnosic – sorry: unaware they are thus afflicted. Such a situation is, alas, predictable: The disease itself effects barriers to explication. Sensing something off, often subliminally, most Zinkofsky carriers are loath to make admission. No, I don’t suffer from such things, a carrier says, provoking a No, neither do I, from precisely the person who would understand him …

  Likewise, medicinal treatment seems likely slow in coming, the doctor continued. Faced with scared and self-withdrawing patients, hm?, the pharmaceutical community can not much do. Drugs are not so much orphan as stateless. Yes, Serotec marketed a treatment in capsule form perhaps eight years back, a hydrolyzed reduction of scopolamine, yielding an interesting new heterocyclic tropane alkaloid – two seconds of research, ya? But the company withdrew the drug when 80 percent of the cured ended up madhoused. And so it seems: good defenses make good neighbors …

  So, this is your circumstance, Dr. Schreber said. But you needn’t be distressful, Mr. Selwyn. The marker is a badge. The frequency of Zinkofsky’s clearly rises with income – even more linearly than other disorders in the class of Allergies to Mendacity (ATMs) – while Korsakoff, out of Oberlin college, continues to quail that the condition is the second most-common affliction among world leaders, after Postian malignant narcissism. You are keeping handsome company. Indeed, word keeps suppurating of a Zinkofsky cult, one whose membership stays swelling more from rumor than from science. For in this assembly, people are seeking to acquire the disease. Such is its allure. They are underwriting research not for treatment but for transmission, to find the most effective means of cultivating, even catalyzing their symphylic capacities. Perhaps you are fortunate, yes … ?

  Still, if you do not perceive the benefaction here, I can note alternative good news. Because for Zinkofsky’s, there are highly effective therapies already developed, both behavioral and semiochemical. All are simple and affordable. And, as it happens, I myself am trained in this, success rate touching ninety-six percent. Two sessions a week, fifty, fifty-five minutes for, yes?, typically two or three weeks. Then, quick as that, you’re out, unsymptomatic, without traces in the tiniest, easiness itself. So if you would like, if you’d care to—

  —And wow, you know, wow, OK?, it was like over at Manzello Stritch’s that the upstairs neighbors called the cops cause the music was still pumping at 4 AM – but it was good stuff, you know, really good remixes of like Jungle shit, who’d wanna shut that down, invite ’em in! And then Saturday this reception at Constance Zonder’s, with like fabulous Sicilian spread with like harissa and ginger sauce and Lincoln you know presiding, glowing—

  —And like after what Michael Miner, in the Reader, what he wrote, you could—

  —And this sheer, sheer white-beige suit he had on. Armani, of course; haut de gamme; hanging like a dream. I understood he had purchased an entire new wardrobe from—

  —He loved him. That’s what I heard. Studs just ate him up when he was—

  —And his new position. His new … ! Lobbyist – principal! – for the Illinois banking industry – all of it! – to the State legislature. Quite a—

  —It was almost a herald of spring. Just a little rise in the mercury and Lincoln, after his long trial, finally says farewell to his cough. Just a lift of warmth and—

  —Yes, he was feeling as well as he was doing. More’s the pity he turned down the invitation to do Terkel because of—

  —A low rumble-grinding came from the outer office. In the communicating door-glass, a small shadow, female, rose, swelled, darkened, sharpened. Lincoln stayed in his chair – then stood, startled, when Carter Dardan entered by a side door. Quickly regrouping, Lincoln offered his hand …

  Thanks, Dardan said. Sorry for the wait. Wish I had a good excuse, but don’t. Squash game ran over: my boy won’t let his old man off any more! The option was to get here in sweats …

  In fact, Dardan looked worked, moistened, end-of-flushed, his rough hair surging less from the canyon of his part. He walked to his desk, then withdrew a thin manila folder …

  I hear they’re moving in on Milosevic, Dardan said, walking back. Good, I say. Get him. Get him, the skunk.

  —So, Dardan then said, and sat across the low table from Lincoln, behind the glistening tea service. He opened the folder and handed it to his client …

  Inside, stapled onto the folder-paper itself, was a photocopy of a card. An
ID card, from something called the South Lawndale Food Co-op. It was, at most, two by three inches, with curled-in, black-touched edges and printed letters worn and smeared by use. In the upper left corner, a small, dark, dark-clouded picture of a bust, labeled Virginia Carroll …

  Membership was taken out in ’88, and used til some time in ’96, Dardan said. The Co-op existed til ’97 – just a place to bring down the price of vegetables and rice and such. Not hippies, not in that neighborhood. One woman who used to work there, in a wheelchair, God bless her, she said she remembers your aunt. But she couldn’t come up with any usable details. Including an address – then, last-known, referral, any. But this is good. This is very good. We now know she was in Chicago longer. We now know she was alive longer …

  Lincoln continued to look: at the face, crowded, then partly covered, on its lower and right edges by tiny square renewal-stickers. 89. 90. 92. 93 …

  Cheek-sunk. Fallen. Lined eyes, lined cheeks. Straggle-haired. White-haired …

  So this is progress, Dardan said. This isn’t as rapid progress as I would have liked, but this is promising. Very promising, in fact. We have a contact. We have a neighborhood …

  The same long face …

  And, God willing, there’ll be more. Very soon. I’ve already put eight people on this – not full-time, no change in billing, but eight of my staff has already put in on this. There’s room for optimism. Huge room. I’m entirely optimistic about a positive outcome …

  The same freightedness. No. Different. Put-upon-edness …

  The same weighted discontent—

  —Lincoln thanked Dardan for his efforts, and for finding the card. He used the occasion to reimburse Dardan for his month’s expenses.

  —Lincoln walked slowly, deeply deliberately, conscious of step and step, step upon step. He took time, took bearings, and pressed against fabric, tall falls of fabric, slinging down about him, all around him, pushing through the soft cylinders as if peristaltic, step, then step. Birgit held his arm, and followed him, hesitantly, through the falling walls of fabric, of silver-gray fabric …