“I thought you were dead,” Viola says.
“Oh sure,” says her son. “I was. But according to the ancient laws of pregnancy, after three times, something is born. You can’t expect to give birth three times without something being born.”
“I suppose not,” Viola says. Sometimes, in the dream, she’s back in North Carolina, on the coast, where she lived as a girl with her aunt and uncle, and everything around her has once more been flattened by Hurricane Diana. Other times she’s walking through downtown Indianapolis late at night when the first contractions hit, and she gives birth surrounded by empty corporate towers and closed restaurants, terrified that something or someone will swoop down on her and steal her child before it has the chance to speak.
~ ~ ~
The chief of police says, “This is my good friend John T. Rockefeller, from the FBI. He’s here to tell us what the FBI is going to do.”
A clean-cut man in a dark suit approaches the microphone. He smiles at the representatives of the media, then assumes a serious expression. “Primarily, the FBI is going to investigate. That’s something that the FBI is very good about. The FBI has labs like you wouldn’t believe, full of technologies so new they don’t even have names yet, and we bring the full weight of this technology to bear on investigating. Plus, the FBI can fit into very tight spaces. Any space large enough for the FBI to get its head into, it can fit into that space. You might think that you have hidden something very well — someplace that you feel no one in a hundred years would think to look — underneath a floorboard, or sewn into the bottom of your mattress, or inside a crack in the wall of your house leading, so far as you know, only to the terrifying emptiness beyond. In all likelihood, the FBI has already found it. The FBI will squirm into those spaces you thought forever hidden, and we will find what you have put there. And then we will test those things, in our labs.
“Of course we welcome and even expect the good-faith efforts of local and state police to assist us in these endeavors, keeping always in mind that, no matter how crude their efforts may appear in comparison, we think of them nonetheless as our ‘brothers in enforcement’ and fellow upholders of the Law… ”
~ ~ ~
“I want to be kind towards you,” Viola says to Robert. Robert is cutting up a tomato for a tomato sandwich. “Ultimately this is your loss, as well as mine. But I’m not sure if I have enough kindness right now to show towards both of us.”
“I get that,” Robert says. “That makes sense.”
“In the future I will probably be kinder,” Viola says.
Robert and Viola eat the honestly somewhat disappointing tomato sandwiches that Robert fixed. The tomatoes were beautiful, but not delicious. Later, they drive to a home furnishings store. They wander through aisles full of pepper grinders and salt grinders and ironing boards and extra-thick “European-style” towels. Viola keeps wanting to buy things that don’t go with anything else in the house. “Where would we put that?” Robert says.
“I don’t know, Robert, I don’t know. What difference does it make?”
Robert doesn’t have an answer for this.
Inevitably they buy something. Viola holds the pillow that doesn’t go with anything else in the house in her lap on the drive back, and she imagines herself slowly, over the course of months or years, replacing everything in the house with something else, even the floorboards, even the walls.
~ ~ ~
At work Robert empties documents from storage boxes, puts different-colored sticky notes on each document to identify what role it is to play in the upcoming deposition, then puts each document back in the storage box from which it came. There are mountains of storage boxes. New storage boxes keep arriving, smiling legal clerks rolling them in on handtrucks.
Robert is an associate at an old and prestigious law firm in Indianapolis that has as its clients several energy companies as well as Obadiah Birch Pharmaceuticals, headquartered downtown. Birch has been accused of marketing an erectile dysfunction drug for use in the treatment of Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, an unapproved indication and one for which the drug seems wholly unsuited besides. Robert, with his sticky notes and his boxes and boxes of documents, is on the team handling the defense litigation. The lawsuit comes in the wake of several highly-publicized reports of once-rowdy students engaging in uncontrollable, albeit sedate, frottage in middle-school classrooms across the country. Robert doubts the case will go anywhere. Most likely, no one but he and his legal clerks will see a single one of his sticky- noted documents.
The building that houses the firm was designed by the architectural team of Vonnegut & Bohn, whose other work in Indianapolis includes the Ayres Building, the William H. Block Co. Building, and the German Renaissance Revival-style Athenaeum, also known as Das Deutsche Haus. Several of the original Vonnegut & Bohn buildings have been torn down, which is unfortunate, culturally speaking, but many of those that remain are on the register of national historic places.
Bernard Vonnegut, Sr., of Vonnegut & Bohn, was the grandfather of the writer Kurt Vonnegut, whose name is carved, along with those of Shakespeare, Plato, and Dostoevsky, in a frieze that runs along the outside of the library where Robert’s wife Viola works.
“The question from a legal perspective is whether the company specifically encouraged this off-label use,” says one of the bright-eyed, smooth-skinned legal clerks.
“Yes,” says Robert.
“Of course doctors are free to prescribe off- label uses, if they want to,” says the legal clerk. “That’s not the issue.”
“Right,” says Robert, sorting through the delivery that he has ordered for his legal team. “Do you want a corned beef? What do you want?”
“I believe actually I ordered the pastrami.”
Robert thinks about the summer between his L1 year and his L2 year, before he met Viola, when he had briefly dated a blond, skinny legal clerk at the firm where he was interning in New York. She had such a good face. It was a long face, but Robert liked it. He keeps up with her occasionally; there is the occasional email. He knows basically nothing about her personal life, but professionally, she is doing quite fine.
I showed a high degree of promise in law school, Robert thinks. I edited my school’s law review. I had offers from several more prestigious firms in New York, but chose instead to come here, back to Indianapolis. It was not Viola’s first choice, but she understood how important it was to me, the idea of home. She found a job here and for a while it seemed like everything was exactly right.
During breaks he looks up vacation destinations on the internet: Maui, Barcelona, the Black Forest, Tibet. He looks at pictures of foreign destinations and feels a longing.
Robert has so much money but it never feels like that much money.
“How old are you now, Robert?” asks one of the firm’s senior partners. “Forty?”
“Thirty-six.”
“Thirty-six. That’s still quite young. In the grand scheme of things, Robert, that’s quite young indeed. You have your whole life ahead of you, Robert.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“And you have a beautiful wife. Is this your wife?” the partner asks, picking up the framed picture of Viola from Robert’s desk.
“Yes sir.”
“Beautiful,” the senior partner says.