LEON AND FRESKO
Leon banged open the metal door and staggered out onto the tar-covered roof. Fresko followed. They circled each other in sunlight, both men in a martial crouch. Voices screeched from the walkie-talkies on their hips. They wore shirts with name patches. Leon’s said LEON. Fresko’s said PETE. They worked maintenance in adjacent buildings. They were friends, and they planned to make an action movie with Leon’s new camera over the weekend. During lunch they rehearsed the dialogue for the fight scene.
“One of us is going to die today,” Fresko said.
“That would be you, dog,” Leon said. “It’s time to punch out, bro.”
“I’ll dock your goddamn existence.”
“I’ll take it up with the grievance committee.”
“They’ll be grieving for you,” Fresko said.
“No time for arbitration, son. See this fist of mine? This is your severance package.”
Leon and Fresko charged each other. They didn’t know how to movie fight. They only knew how to fight fight. So, by tacit agreement, they fought fought. It was the only way the scene would seem real. They ran at each other, collided, punched. They kicked and bit and spun in a clinch. And then Leon fell off the side of the building. Fresko thought it was a joke. It didn’t seem as if it was happening, but it was happening. That’s how so many things happen.
You would never be able to ask Fresko about it. Not much later, he was doing five years for manslaughter. He hardly ever spoke, though one day he started to laugh and didn’t stop for hours. Somebody on the cellblock asked him what was so goddamn funny, but he couldn’t get the words out. What struck him at that moment was the realization that he and Leon had never solved the question of who was going to shoot the scene. They’d be too busy fighting, and there was nobody they could trust to do a decent job. Maybe the camera could have followed the action if they had used some sort of professional robotic thingamajig, but how could they have afforded such equipment? They were janitors, for God’s sake. Oh, Leon. You moron. You were the only friend I ever had. We were going to be viral on the Internet. I didn’t spin you hard. You let punk-ass physics take you. Together forever, I thought. But you had to be a pumpkin. You had to smush your dumbshit head.
ZACH
Even a monkey can make money. That’s what my mother always told me, but I think she undersold herself. She was a remarkable woman. That’s why I’m remarking on her now. She was also the only person who ever seemed like a person to me.
She started like everybody else, if everybody else started as a half-cultured girl from Connecticut who reckoned that all she had to do was sustain an aura of dazzling freshness and a husband would arrive to keep her in cozy bondage. She’d raise some love-starved children, and the husband would bring home the bacon and, with any luck, not spend many waking hours at home eating it.
This is exactly how it went for a while, but then her particular bacon procurer drove home from the city dead drunk and died. So she went out and made her own, well, let’s just call it money again. My mother became a successful Realtor and invested early in many soon-to-be lucrative areas. But her stock market strategies aren’t the point. The fact that here was a woman, a nearly destitute widow in a very sexist America who ventured out into a man’s world and slayed, is the point. I grew up rich, and she sent me to top-shelf schools. I took art history and some art theory classes that puzzled and intrigued me. There was the funny lingo. Everybody was always “interrogating hegemonic discourse” and so forth. I hung out with kids who were really fascinated by this crap. They were also really into cocaine and sex. I was bound for an M.B.A. after college, but I liked to sit around the table late at night, drunk and high, smoking cigarettes and arguing points that I had just barely grasped in seminar. I usually brought the cocaine, and I was often rewarded with sex.
I forgot most of this for many years. I went into banking and made mad cake. I managed a hedge fund and made madder cake, or, rather, money. I became one of those guys you never see and have never heard of but who is the sick-ass king of certain sectors of the market, employing instruments you could never in your math-illiterate lifetime comprehend. I know this tone, my tone, is insufferable. But that’s the thing that nobody understands. If you want to make money, you have to be smart and a cunt and also work harder than anyone else. Most folks can’t manage all three. But I could, and I prospered, as my mother had.
Then my mother died. It sucked in all the ways you’d be familiar with if your mother (assuming she wasn’t horrid) died. But then a cruel thought occurred to me, like some microscopic killer drone sent by the National Security Agency into my head via my ear canal. I could picture it swooping down and firing a withering notion into that seething cauldron of ideation commonly known as the human mind/brain: What if I’m not really grieving for my mother, the thought detonation went, but, without my conscious knowledge, faking it? This would not be for appearances’ sake, but to maintain sanity. What if I had managed to trick myself into feeling/experiencing the normal emotions of a normal person stricken with grief to avoid the realization that I was a frozen freak, unmoved by the death of my mother?
Hell, I know I’m not the first person to question the authenticity of his emotions, but I’m quite possibly the wealthiest, and the question lingered.
I checked my finances and realized I had enough money to live on until the end of time.
I quit my job, which wasn’t really a job, but more a jobstyle, and set off on a quest to interrogate the discourse of authenticity. I called up an old professor of mine. He’d become quite famous as a television pundit but still retained a shred of academic credibility and nearly all his hair. He murmured something as I explained my project.
“Excuse me?” I said.
“We don’t say ‘interrogate’ anymore,” the professor said. “You know, Guantanamo. For the same reason we don’t suggest that anybody has ‘tortured’ a theme or that a term paper will be satisfactory once the student ‘waterboards’ the conclusion a little. Language betrays us, uses us. Language goes through us the way a young onanist goes through that dust-sheathed pocket pack of Kleenex on his family’s basement crafts shelf.”
“Sure,” I said. “But what about my project?”
“It seems retrograde and silly,” the professor said, “but for five hundred large I will endorse certain strains of your proposal without getting behind the thing completely.”
“Done and done,” I said.
“What does the second done refer to?”
“The cementing of my distaste for you.”
Not long after this, at a Hot & Crusty on Columbus, I met the painter Gregory. He was scraping all the seeds and salt and burnt onion shavings from an everything bagel with a plastic fork. In other words, he was transforming an everything bagel into a nothing bagel. Typical of an artist, to make conceptual work of his breakfast. I told him I admired his concept. He told me to fuck off, that they had given him the bagel by mistake and he was afraid to ask for another because even though he was an ex-cop, he was frightened by the lady behind the counter. I winked in complicity with his ruse, and he told me to fuck off again. Then I went to the counter and bought him a plain bagel. He relented. He told me everything about his life, his police career, his son, who somewhere along the way had stopped being his son and had become the shadow self of an edgy young-adult-novel narrator from the eighties, his cancer, and how he, Gregory, had come out of the closet at the “ripe, but not old” age of forty-seven, his first encounter being with an angular, large-penised boy named Ronko. Finally Gregory told me of his work as a painter for fictional painters. I felt as if I’d struck gold vis-à-vis my quest to not interrogate, but simply explore questions of authenticity.