The Easy Chain

by Evan Dara

  How undifficult it was … Self-emendations, large and small, were available just like that, easier than nothing. The building sought change. It sensed its inadequacies, worked to upgrade. Blueprints, maps, personnel lists, every sort of editorial tool was there for the having. X is the spot where, X is where … Passkeys, security codes, ID schematics, masses and charges, all accessible. You just have to ask, and put your hand in your pocket. If X didn’t have it, X would know someone who. Assuredly, X marked the spot. X marked all spots. Arno is everywhere …

  The sesame is the law of twos. He had heard about this from a Times-Mirror photographer, had read it in Esquire (had something, someactivity, somewhere). One camera slung around the neck is an amateur, an imposter. Two is a professional. All doors crumble. Welcome on in. It also works with voltmeters. Visible, in multiple, staging the invisible event. Just attend to matters of show.

  He could see the headlines, the paragraphed reports, the jump pages. Selections, orderings, perspectivizings, traducing the action to fit proper form, professionalized. His intervention, being necessary, would ripple out, as the press’ reflexes commenced their flutter. Inevitably. Automatically. Coverage. *He* would give them something to talk about, precipitate the great argument. But he was only providing the spark, the kindling, jumpstarting a process already ordained, clicking the trick of fame:::: It would light itself, right then, from within.

  It will not be quick. Slowly, gradually, as the roiling seepage starts, receptor neurones in the nasal mucosa, high up along the Schneiderian membranes, will start to sheen and sparkle, noses will tickle, mitral cells will come alight, olfactory bulbs will blip and flare, the cortex will squawk at the hypothalamus, heads will unfasten themselves from stared-at notepads, or pixel screens, and pivot, looking up, around, under ogival eyebrows, then, soon, turn back to the business at hand, business as usual, opportunities, interests, refusing unprying from the minutiae, deep-fixing back upon it, involuntarily, automatically, & not go to investigate a thing.

  Perfectly, then, it will be too late. Equivocation will undo them. The building is not up to code. In the post-Triangle, pre-Happy Land interval when the structure went up, safety formulas had not been fine-tuned, or understood, and all kinds of concessions were made. Space shaved for additional storage, or rounded up to match then-prevalent office-size expectations, or for other immediate, i.e. marketable, usefulness. Materials went unmonitored and unverified. Signage was often unclear, inadequate. Building commissions were suggestible. There were only two, at most three, large-scale, serviceable exits. For two forty-floor hives. It has in it something dangerous. Dozens, hundreds would be caught, clambering, clamoring, scrabbling for advantage, stumbling and lurching over one-another, arms kayaking, knees clubbing, hard shoe-soles scraping and abrading the cloth and flesh they were scaling. A dogpile of people, scabbing up, a ghastly assembly, immobilized by their churn-blood furies of movement, flailing to escape the burning zone, in a harried human evagination of the kneeling building. Especially at 2:15 PM, height of the day, suppurating peak of the trading session, heart-furnaces stoked by commercial lusts and keening ambition.

  Lincoln turns a corner on the ground floor by elevator bank C and a woman collapses, swoops from atop her pucklike black heels, one dislodged. Passersby, jacketed CME traders, uniformed guards, small-sweep janitorial staff all go to her, some rush, some arch in on observing steps. The woman, in gray business blazer and skirt, had been carrying a straw-stung carton of juice, now spilling, now picked up. Sprawled, she is making no sound. Through yelps and What … ?s and drawn breaths, a guard calls for a cup of water, another temples a walkie-talkie. A woman ministering to the fallen, down by her side, cries for a cloth, a wet cloth. Lincoln calls that he will get one, and goes towards Rivers restaurant, pushes through a door beside it and enters service corridor 1-9, runs down this dark hallway to a utility room some sixty feet away. He palms open its ajar door, takes a white dishtowel from the storage cupboard, wets it from the sink’s humped spigot. After he squeezes the towel free from drip, he hangs it over the spigot, unhooks his narrow-nosed pliers, climbs on a corner chair & replaces a 40-ampere with a 95-ampere fuse in the brittle metal box high above the doorframe. By the time he is back in the atrium-lobby, the woman has her eyes open and her head supported by a guard on one knee. She’s able to say Thanks, thanks so, for the towel as it’s passed down to her by onlookers & put on the arch of her forehead. The guard says she’ll be OK. Comforted, the woman lets her head come to rest on someone’s orange summer sweater, bunch-folded between her and the hard marble.

  Released, the custodian walks from the atrium-lobby … He turns past elevator bank E, passes through a west-wall door, enters grit-dusk service corridor 1-3. There, more storage rooms, and on every skanky multi-padlocked door a sign, for Kochef, Fuku & Thymos, LLC, for Limbardo-Zilgram Worldwide, for … He picks up his walking tempo. Time is starting to press. But it is getting easier for him to move. He is getting lighter. He is leaving bits of himself with every sub-intervention. Each junction box or Crowley, every tab and double-checked Bussmann and wire-twist and step, once left or done is a fragment of him given away, loosened, let go … Each a small medicinal dose curing him as well … Then, after he administers the last application, in Room 33-8, he will board the service elevator and glide to the ground, and go slowly, gently, down corridor 1-12, then back into the atrium-lobby. There he will step past the elevator banks and the guards’ desk and the newsstand, and come to rest by the black-on-gray wall directory, a place so far forward in the building that it receives dayshine. That will be his spot … Sightlines will be exquisite, almost comp – comprehensive. And he will be less than twelve feet from the doors to West Monroe. Doors that, he checked, blueprints can change, open out.

  Lincoln steps past the storage cage in room B-44, manages to balance, it’s past time for tape, his flashlight between two rivet-filled transverse beams. He unlocks the door, drubbed by shadows, of the shallow metal box affixed to the room’s rear wall, and quickly, easily, shuts down the building’s silent alarm, using only a screwdriver and twine. He closes the box’s door, leaves the remaining bristly cord. Should he, now, continue to hide himself? … Is it still necessary to proceed with the travesty of masks and tilts, this uniform-deep plotting? They would not see him … Mao-ized people, automata, OK?, puppetized by the specious present, indifferent to their own indifference … That much was clear. The deeper he went, the brighter his light, his clarity … He was from his own limitations being taken away … He tells himself that he can see it happening, the walls shuddering and seeping, streaming grubby pitchsmoke, the slow arrival of what cannot, what can *never* be assimilated. He tells himself that he has been given an opportunity & must take it, make the most of it, maximize returns. He has felt the call, and now will call back. This will be a transit, a deturning, a hinge in time. Hey: he will make this building, this day, his own.

  He attaches the transponder to the Crowley’s import surface. It had held its branching, he was pleased to see, through the four days. His work was good. He sees himself entering the intervention’s final gate, his return to room 33-8 indicates the essential commencement. All that’s needed now is the spark … One flick, one contact, and the sequence begins. First send the electrical system into rapid oscillation, then let the voltage multipliers and frequency dephasers churn together to create the overcurrent. It is, at that point, just a matter of minutes. By the time the slightly more cost-effective sheathing used, and acknowledged, and never corrected, on virtually all the building’s wiring proves that Someone Really Shouldn’t Have Let This Go, it will be too late. The rebounding circuit will drive a multitude of junctures to arcing and shorting, insulating materials will start to combust, and the cocktail of resulting byproducts – carbon particles, carbon monoxide, unstable silicates, ethylene, cyclohexane – will release into the structure’s largely air-tight wall-insulation channels, pressing and gathering and building until reaching unsustainable temperatures
and concentrations. And right then, in a moment, a wink, a gap between shivers, the mixture bursting into the inescapable consequence: Flashover, the self-feeding fireball that will flood through the building’s unseen spaces, careering and coruscating and delivering rages of smoke and gasses and …

  It will light up the building, light up the city. Illumination will finally come to Chicago, through unexpected instrumentalities. And no one knows it’s on its way. No one senses, or suspects, any of it, & will not until the inevitable, the deeply determined, comes crushing in, the bone realization that first contact is the decisive one, that nature knows no phatic communication. The first thing they’ll see will be that, until the last, they had seen nothing.

  … Lincoln is back in the atrium-lobby. The large hall still sings with movement, measured steps and scamper, papers held before eyes or pressed to chests. Freed now, Lincoln crosses the space & gets on line, goes on line, goes to the line, waits for access to the ATM. At screen, he checks his balance, asks for a receipt. Then sluices his ING back into the slot & withdraws twenty bucks, adding to his deficit, which he folds into his leg-level coverall pocket. He does not seek a second rattling receipt …

  He walks back to the building’s West Monroe side, listing slightly left, for reasons he cannot grasp. He touches the rounded metal object, heavy like an apple in his—

  —Hey, Lincoln … ? Linc—

  He whips to the sound.

  —Linc, that you … ?

  —“—”

  —How you doin’, guy? Where you … ? What you—?

  Lincoln stutters off … Turns back, shakes his head, keeps going across the peopled space, scupples directly through ’em … Then walks straighter, more upright, pulse and shoulders thrusting … He is not heading in the direction of the Monroe position but must not swerve, so continues past the darkened visitor’s reception area, past the escalators’ liftoff skirts, towards the shadier haven of the service elevators behind. Once in this new position he leans a shoulder on the wall, facing the riverside exits, there vows to wait two full minutes, heart-blatherings, time-dilations be damned … The action is too close. There can be no compromise of efficacy. But he has received valuable understandings … He will not linger. He will witness the very beginning of the intervention, then not be there, a volatile liquid … It will be absence as refuge. (He does not need visual confirmation. That tyranny, finally, will be brought down. The sense of the eye will no longer be the sense of the world. Light will light the way to the end of light’s limits.)

  And if he does not make it through the doors? … What difference. What would be lost? … What would be killed? … Someone, once, of a wronged faction … No more … No less …

  He breaks from behind the elevator bank:

  —Get out!, he says to a passing trader, whose green smock twists to the sound. Go on! Get out of here!

  The trader looks at Lincoln.

  —Go to where you … I’m not kidding … !

  The trader looks at his legal pad, intently reads its ruled penmarks, walks on. ’N hup the custodian walks in another direction, towards Rivers, the linentable restaurant, then towards the main Wacker Drive exit/entrance doors … By the small fire substation hidden in a mid-lobby wall, valves, looped hoses, nozzles behind a slat of matte granite, Lincoln feels the pinky-side of his left hand tingling … It is nerve-burbling, charged … He raises it, looks at it, does not rub … It has fallen asleep … But there is a current, branched … He sees the building turning amber. He sees the substances, basalt?, gypsum?, lime?, that were sifted into the construction stocks converting into incandescence, becoming colors that their ground states showed no indication of harboring. A growth instinct that, once triggered, cannot be suppressed::::

  Smoothing his coverall with the flats of his hands, Lincoln emerges from the eclipse into which, for temporary protection, he had folded himself … He walks toward position, conjoinment of granite, marble and fluorescence, the telling angle by the Monroe Street doors … His point of view is now impeccable … He sees himself, he sees others seeing himself, correction: self-serving constructions of same, doing what can not be done, what must never be done … Making the call back. How simple it is, prepped by lifetime rehearsal. Just a quick fingertip rumba upon the keypad, a jointly spiderdance, eleven steps across the scalloped playfield. But for whom to pick up … For whom?

  It is not vengeance. He sees it more as an editorial function. A necessary emendation to the ascendant storyline of his place, his time. A refusal to stet its crackpot-pathogenic source codes, the unquestioned congeries of deep, unarticulated beliefs that all is telling all, all the time, and that shams reasonableness through rationalization, manipulability, banked-up fear, blood-love of delusion and, forget all those, just this: repetition. The snowball schema-fairytale whose accumulated mass makes every spark of cerebration curve unto it. And that makes all its contributing editors into its prisoners. Self-referencing, self-reaffirming, self-justifying, self-excusing, the perpetual mass echolalia is safely encased within its event horizon. But it is necessary for the terrible shell to be penetrated. To be burned away. And then to visit the revealed and pristine landscape … (& leave no trace) … In short, to use the gift of unlistening as a space, an opportunity, therefore a necessity, to call out new terms.

  Lincoln puts his hand into his coverall’s right hip pocket, feels the downward tug of the rounded deadweight within it … He pulls out the palm-sized cell phone, an ordinary AT&T, so the logo reminds him, over-folded and silver-gray … Burnished-modern-seeming, a fetus in his fingers … Now he need only push numbers, then wait for the final quantifications … He will be sending a message that is no message, a signal that, though no signal, will be the most consequential he has ever presented … It will communicate more of him … his urgings … his longing … his essence … than any he had previously emitted … And he need not even lift the thing to his lips. The action of this unborn will speak for him, and his wounded name, and generate that which is vitally, inexpressibly necessary.

  He looks up and sees, marching through the middle of the atrium-lobby, from the main doors straight to the central, heaven-tempting escalators, a trader, in loose-draped sky-blue swingy jacket and light brown rubbersoft shoes. Limb-lifting, doublequick, the bulky, buzz-cut palooka is right then hustling himself back to the magic floor, vector of the world, the pits, to trade, and trade, and trade more, from livestock to feedgrains to euros. Lincoln flinches … This conformist, striving, self-vorticizing squaller-mewler, OK?, who knows what to say about him?, self-contented, self-satisfied, automatized, chasing, chased, terrified – one of the million million brindles from which the malignancy emerges: is Lincoln making the call against him? … For him? … To him? … Lincoln’s pulse quickens … Bulb-light, breaking through dust-scups from high on the ceiling, gilds the trader’s three-letter identity badge, then the curving fore-edge of his shoe, then a filament of hair … Regardless, {the trader} continues forward …

  With his index finger, Lincoln dries a bead just below his hairline … When parchedness makes his tongue cluck, he sees his vision diamond-blur from more moisture … But he is only doing what’s necessary … He is only there because his intervention, because he, is necessary … Because rightness, instinct, something pre-civilized is instructing and guiding him toward the pure discharging of one true act. Its wisdom is irrefutable: by working on ends, he will no longer be a means … There is his proof … The snags of sentiment that come to him are only evidences of his hypertrophied feeling for these people, & this building, & their harsh world, the exquisite, even exemplary sympathy that has let him see what must be done … Seeping into an immergence, armed in flow, he is no longer, he realizes, concerned with his own action … He does not even see it … He is looking *vastly* further … to its consequences, its ripple implications … To the farthest reaches of its massed and multiplying light … Quickly, he flips the cell phone open, welcomes its top half to his cushioning fingerpads, takes a s
hallow step back when the phone falls to the marble floor … He hups in a gasp … He looks down, around … Happily, no one heard … and no one turns to look … as he bends to recuperate the rear panel of the phone’s bottom half … &, then, the silver-gray body of the miracle-tech instrument, as it goes dark …

  Here he throws the phone down, astonished, livid, damn ’em to hell if anyone notices … BFD … But the phone’s splack ’n skittle is tiny amid the giant room’s hums and shuttlings, and he does not bother to turn away when he takes the phone from his coverall’s left hip pocket … There is no reason to hide … He wipes his hands on his legs, passing the phone from hand to hand as he rubs his palms dry, and opens his instrument with deliberation, with surety … It lights, it fits, in his half-fist. Its backlit numbers glow up to his fixing eyes … inviting … illuminating the axial way …

  He feels his pulse dull, his heart’s jitterings ease … The blips are no longer capitals … ’N within a moment Lincoln is calmer … more easeful … glisteny … translucent … Soon, words gather in his ear, & purl for him to hear: I am intention. This is correct. I have resources. This is correct … He is more sure than ever, now, that his is the right course … that he is an agent of rightness, that he is acting in the light of its clarion call … It was rightness that had brought him here, the rightness and sweet reason that works in laws, that speaks in laws … natural, unfolding, irresistible, inevitable … providential … laying the path, providing the impetus for his needed calling, the necessary call … He could hear it, clear as a bell, an alarm bell … He touched the numbers, made them right, rose to action and all was light … The sparks in his phone will become the light of the world … Just one ring from his cell, a single ion-jump linkage, will initiate the conversation, the epochal conversion …