I imagine him right now sitting in his rec room watching television, perhaps the show that dramatizes the rescues once someone has called the emergency number. Every time I watch that program, I think of him in his recliner, feeling good about his public life, the stories he watches a kind of endless testimonial to his goodness.
When I was a kid, I believed in creating a kind of chronic discomfort, using the telephone to disrupt the workaday world. “Do you have Prince Edward in the can? You do? Well, you better let him out.” I dialed the numbers randomly. “Is your refrigerator running? It is? Well, you better go chase it.” I flipped through the phone book looking for funny names, calling the Frankensteins or the Cockburns. I liked transforming the telephone into something dangerous. People being startled by the bell, their hands frozen for a moment before reaching the rest of the way to pick up. My little voice, a needle in their ears, creating these anxious moments. Let him out! Go chase it! I’d make up fictions to clear the party line so that I could call my girlfriend. Or I would listen to the neighbors talking to each other, letting them know I was there. I would always be there.
A guy like you, Ed, would keep on answering the phone, would think after all the heavy breathing I’d want to talk with you. You believe in signs, in what they say. The tinkling bells of the ice cream truck would have you racing down the street. You answer the phone without a second thought. Is your refrigerator running?
Poor Ed. Everything in the world can be used, used in ways you’d never dream, used against you. Twisted. Devoured. Pulled inside out. I like to imagine you cringing in your dark rec room, the flicker of your television slapping you around, your sweaty skin sticking to the gummy vinyl of your lounger. I made you crawl. You were so easy to kick. I watched you drag yourself along the oiled back roads, the uncut ditches of Allen County, where well-bred children who hurl rocks at the Amish buggies just to hear the wood splinter took aim at you.
In the bedrooms of America, no one ever entertains the fantasy of a liberal with a whip. They desire something more, something more like me but dressed to the hilt in black uniform and patent leather, professional looking, someone who might be truly dangerous. It’s in the eyes. It’s there in the tight smile. In the privacy of their own rec rooms some people like to dress up. People like to be hurt. People like to hurt. They play out their own amateur versions of epic conflicts. Here words don’t mean the same things. Saying stop doesn’t work. Stop means keep on going. Try to imagine it. What to yell when things get out of hand, when the stimulation in these dramas exceeds the threshold of endurance? I’ve heard they scream or mutter: 911. 911. The number you invented has been absorbed into this language of love.
I hate to think about these things at all. But we live in the sickest of times. It’s still a matter of trust. Your partner will stop if you find the right thing to say. What can I say, Ed? What number can I call? It seems I can’t exist without these dramas. There are the good guys and the bad guys. I like that. Someone gets hurt. Someone does the hurting. And the bells keep ringing.
On Quayleito
I know now how it works. I spent one afternoon in my office with an eyeglasses repair kit dismantling the thing. I unscrewed the little screws that held the tiny hinges, unhooked the rubber bands, untied the threads with tweezers, freed the minute springs as fine as hair. The pieces lay scattered on my desk blotter. I put the various parts in the empty squares of days mapped out on the appointment calendar. I had been ordered to lay low awhile, rehabilitate myself.
I never drink the water anywhere. It can make you sick. But in Chile, I waded into one of their outdoor markets to look for something local to ingest. I wasn’t going to be a Nixon holed up in the limousine rushing through the platas pelted by eggs. I believe native populations can smell the fear. Gorbachev kissed babies on a street in Washington, DC. I can shake a few hands and handle some grapes in Santiago.
Marilyn waited back at the embassy. I was sandwiched in a three-car motorcade. “Stop the car,” I ordered. “How do I say, ‘How much?’”
The car was already floundering in the market crowd. I like to move through a thick mass of people this way, the ring of security wedging me along, hands disconnected from the faces they belong to reach through to touch me, to try to grab my hands. “Steady, lads,” I barked out to the agents.
The squids were huge, draped over clotheslines like parachutes. The shrimps looked like stomachs. Chickens squawked when the vendors held them up to me by their feet. We’d move from the sun to the shade made by awnings of brightly colored blankets and gauzy dresses. I could smell coffee roasting. The potatoes were the size of golf balls and colored like breakfast cereal. Rabbits in wooden cages watched what must have been skinned rabbits skewered on spits turning over charcoal fires. Where we walked, the ground was covered with the skins of smashed vegetables and crushed leaves and tissue wrappers. I slipped on a mango peel.
I pointed at fruit I had never seen before. The crowd that had been drifting along with us hushed to a whisper. The farmer brushed the flies away from melons that looked like pictures of organs in an anatomy book. Stripped, gland-sized berries secreted gummy juices. The apples had thorns and were orange. Another fruit had been split open to show it was choking with sacks of blood red liquid. The flies swarmed around the farmer’s hand as he pointed from one bushel to the next. He threw some plums into a sack and waved away the aide who tried to pay him.
“Gracia,” I said, reaching in for one. I pulled it out and held it up. The crowd cheered. The press took pictures of me eating the plum. I felt like a matador, the crowd cheering me on. The translator said something about water. I told him I didn’t want any, that I never drink it. But he had meant that the plum should be washed. It should have been washed before I bit into it. Too late. The bite I took went to the pit. I survived though I was sick later. It didn’t matter. I was going to get sick one way or the other. The plum was good. It tasted like a plum.
On the way back to the car, we bumped into a stand filled with carved wood figures of little men. I thought they must be souvenirs like the dolls of baseball or football players you get at the stadiums back home whose bobbing plaster heads are attached to the uniformed bodies by a bouncy spring.
“¿Cuanto vale?” I asked the surprised seller. The translator told me what he said.
“Is that the right price?” I asked the translator.
He shrugged. “Seems fair,” he said. And I told him to tell the man I’d take one.
I held the figure in my hands, admiring the workmanship. Though crude there was a deftness to the carving, the way the clothes hung on the body. The bright paint seemed festive and foreign. People in the crowd jockeyed around to get a look. The statue was lighter than I imagined, hollow. I shook it and heard something rattle inside. I noticed an unglued seam at the waist. The crowd was shouting at me now.
“What are they saying?” I asked the translator. He told me they were shouting instructions on how it worked. As he said that, I was pulling gently on the doll’s head. Just then, the joint below the shirt cracked open and a little flesh-painted pee-pee sprung up. The crowd went wild.
Back then, when I bought the doll, I laughed it off. I told the press it was a gift for my wife. I jerked its head a time or two to show what happened. Everyone in the crowd was smiling and giggling. Security, too, looked back at me over their shoulders to catch a glimpse of the exposition, the flesh-colored splinter tipped with the head of a match.