“Nice going.”
But, of course, he’d rather talk about his book.
“There’s an essay on professional wrestling, and another on the evolution of outdoor advertising. I’ve done a long piece examining the semiotics of Japanese pornography, and a reappraisal of Sammy Davis, Jr., called ‘The One-Eyed Man Is King,’ and…”
We move briskly down a long corridor carpeted with plastic grass. I nod and shift my eyebrows as though listening, while his voice blends with piped music and the sighing ventilators. I’m replaying this morning’s phone call to Ellen, who has now exhausted her allotment of emotional leave days.
“I ran out of food over the weekend,” she says from the bedroom of her company apartment. “So I drink lots of tea and chew toothpicks.”
“But you’re all right? I mean…”
“Me and my memory.” She coughs, moves inside rustling sheets. “Crazy what you file away. Little ordinary things that keep clicking into place, out of my control for certain. Probably I belong in a nursing home. Among my souvenirs.”
Never have I heard her voice quite this way. I’m uneasy, wanting her sullen and strong.
“What I can’t get through is why you choose the different bits. Can you sense it maybe? Catching one moment from a sideways kind of angle and there’s an essence that…”
“Unfuckingreal,” K. L. Dukes blurts out.
I’ve taken him into the South Monitor Wing. He seems genuinely impressed by the long wall of screens, the long motionless line of headphoned workers, the galaxy of control buttons.
“Looks like the war room.”
“Someday might be.” And I direct him to the data belt streaking green overhead, runic as a stock ticker.
He wipes his glasses in slow, diminishing circles, and reads:
“BMANILA 20/05 F1 MODE.”
“There’s a political address in five minutes on Philippine state TV.”
“How much do they pay for doing this?”
“Not enough.”
We tube down to the deepest level of hexagonal stacks and I take him through a few of the basics. How to run different searches, excerpting protocol, like that. He rattles his fingers back and forth across black container spines, looking undecided. The face is pinched again, the eyes suspicious. He grabs a tape at random, the 1978 Rose Bowl Parade, and examines it thoroughly, touching every part as if expecting a secret message in braille. Likably, his rhetorical smile is gone. I smell the salsa cruda on his breath.
“It’s insidious,” he says. “Like cancer cells proliferating.”
“You could look at it that way.”
“But you can’t, I suppose.” His expression is half sour, half amused. “One analogy too many.”
“I’ve been at it so long I’m immune.”
Fine and dandy, you’d think, with his beige GUEST badge and his connections-in-law. Whatever’s bothering the boy, it’s no research topic. Anyway, my nose is clean; I’m cooperating. We ascend two levels and I show him catalogs, decipher some of the categorization codes. He feigns interest incompetently, his eyes tracking the movements of everyone else in the room in apparent expectation of seeing someone he knows. Hoping to see them before they see him?
“Let’s head back to your office.”
He sags resignedly, but with a hand on my shoulder pushes me toward the glass doors. Whatever’s bothering the boy…
“There really isn’t any book, but I suppose you already knew that.”
I shrug, disarrange files on my desk.
“The way it is, I sweat a pint of blood just to finish a two-page letter.”
“And you’ve never been to Bowling Green in your life.”
“Oh, no, all that’s genuine. Even my stupid name.” He shows once more that mixture of fatigue and insistence. “Why I’m here is to get something out of Katy’s mother. Think you could get me a key to one of the editing rooms? Just for an hour.”
“Settling a score, is that it?”
“I promise, an hour and no more. In the interest of justice.”
I’m not the least curious as to the details of this familial extortion. I have no qualms about furnishing the key.
Cornmeal pie with jalapeno sausage, pitchers of beer half off. That’s the Wednesday night special at Boot Hill, and I’m taking advantage. Old ladies waltz to Conway Twitty and linemen play poker dice at the bar. Very homey. So what’s Opatowski doing here, I wonder. He and the ex-postmistress who owns the place are supposed to be mighty feuders.
“Nobody cares about appearances in a town this small.”
He pours off the dregs of my pitcher to go with his double bourbon, looks blank when I thank him for the fixup on my TV, says he didn’t hire any Frank Goodhue.
“I didn’t dream the guy. Somebody’s going around your motel with a bag of tools and…”
“So okay. It’s the same as why am I in here when I can drink free in my own joint.” He aims a patient, paternal smile. “People are funny.”
“Not to me.”
40
HAD A FIGHT WITH Heidi in place of breakfast. Floating instinct: I sensed trouble at the scratch of her passkey, knew how she’d attack when I saw the rag twisting in Ajax-white hands. The indictment popped out of her like bread from a toaster. I didn’t play anymore, hardly spoke. I was sullen and distant, made her feel exploited.
“You’re about as much fun lately as choir practice.” An admiring disgust was visible on her face.
I told her she had a husband to absorb her whines and demands, to leave me clear. Heidi flung a toilet brush at me. I caught a lank twist of hair and spun her around. She scratched the back of my hand. I called her a cheap cunt.
Hard to guess which of us took the greater pleasure from it. For me the effect was of a violent morning fuck, raspy but quenching, with a pleasant absence of mind. I smoked a joint on the way to work and took the long way round.
The early sun brought out strips of orange and verdigris green in the terraced slag at the Apex II mine. I curved south through Government Camp, the refurbished ghost town where a squad of retirees clustered around the largest motor home swilling coffee and loading cameras. See America first. Then came the dead farms: rusted tin and crumpled wire, slanting walls. Something had come through here like a plague. Cutting west on blacktop with no center line, I cranked up the radio and downed the windows, loosed Jerry Lee Lewis into the clear, dry air. Ruins normally soothed me, but not today. Everything I saw made me thirsty: sheepskins drying on a fence, even swaybacked ponies snorting water from a halved oil drum. I passed a Papago in a John Deere cap. He wasn’t looking for a ride, just squatting on the shoulder like he had a cottonwood for shade and a slow brown river to watch. What he had was nothing but time.
The guard waves me through and I look for a parking space. I put fruit gum in my mouth and sunglasses over my eyes. This day is too sweet to spoil. Then I meet Foley coming up the center aisle of the lot. He looks a little wobbly.
“Got one for you,” Foley says, pulling my arm like a bell rope. “These two programming veeps, see, they’re on their way to a convention when the plane crashes in the desert. Only survivors. Desolate, pitiless sun. They’re crawling on hands and knees, praying for an oasis before they shrivel up and die. And can you beat it, there’s a certified miracle on top of the next dune. It’s an ice-cold can of peaches and an opener right beside. With trembling hands, they pry the lid up and there’s fruit bobbing in chilled syrup. So the one turns to the other and says, ‘Let’s piss in it.’”
While Foley chuckles harshly at his joke, I notice for the first time a torn segment of a woman’s picture emerging from his shirt pocket and the ink splotch in his hair.
“You know where I grew up?”