I left J.J. to close up his shop and walked alone out under a supernatural cloudscape, the sunset soaking the underbellies of huge formations. The entire world was pink. While I waited out front, a man came toward me, the same one who’d stopped us a while earlier, still gripping some tall invisible thing in the pastel dusk. With his free hand he offered me a piece of paper. “Here. This is my address. It’s written down here.”
“Is this you? Robert Hicks?”
“Check. Robert Hicks,” he said. “What’s your name?”
“Mike.”
“Mike what?”
“Reed.”
“Reed what?”
“Michael Reed. That’s my name.”
“Check. Michael Reed,” he said.
“Who are these other people?” On the scrap of typesheet he’d handed me, a list of almost a dozen names followed his own.
“Those are my friends in the Unit. The Head Trauma Rehabilitation Unit,” he said, “check, the H-T-R-U.”
“Oh.”
“We all have the same address. Check.”
“I get it.”
“The H-T-R-U. The H-T-R-U. The H-T-R-U,” Robert Hicks said.
“Robert — does anybody ever ask you what you’re holding?”
“Not too much. Once in a while.”
“And what is it?”
“I don’t know. I can’t see it. It’s very light,” he said.
He started talking to himself loudly in words I couldn’t understand, and walked away.
I sat on a bus-stop bench, the same stop the campus shuttle had let me out at when I’d arrived, because I didn’t own an automobile, and I watched the aimless strollers — so many of whom had been rendered permanently aimless by bad accidents — as many as two dozen people out on the grounds, concentrating hard on going nowhere. I was convinced I could pick out the patients, the ones getting better, from the University con artists like myself trudging among the buildings. But the new air, the pink sunset, the wide pocked field of slush crossed by the gray bars of the sidewalks like a big faded Confederate flag, people marching crookedly over it as if the battle had just ended…it wouldn’t be claiming too much to say that as I sat there holding in my fingers Mr. Hicks’s list of head-injury victims I felt the stirring even of parts of me that had been dead since childhood, that sense of the child as a sort of antenna stuck in the middle of an infinite expanse of possibilities. And childhood’s low-grade astonishments, its intimations of a perpetual circus…meeting, at random, kids with small remarkable talents or traits, with double-jointed thumbs, a third or even a fourth set of teeth. I don’t claim I enjoyed those long-ago days very much, they were so full of ridiculous horrors, but there was also this capacity of the universe to delight by turning up, like a beautiful shell on a long empty beach, a kid whose older teenaged sister liked to show off her bare breasts, or a boy who could take a drag off a cigarette, pinch his mouth and nostrils shut, and force smoke out through his ears. What happened to them? The boy whose hands were an optical illusion. His hands looked reasonably proportioned and complete, they were unremarkable until you looked closely and discovered that each hand had only three fingers, plus a thumb. But if you asked me, “Which finger was missing?” I couldn’t have chosen. All his fingers seemed to be there.
“Are you looking at my hands?” J.J. asked me on the drive into town. I’d been staring at his two-fisted grip on the wheel of his Karmann Ghia.
I told him about the boy I’d known. “That’s interesting,” he said, but I think he meant it was a stupid thing to admit having on your mind. Meanwhile I suspected his own mind was on his divorce. He seemed preoccupied, and we didn’t talk much as he drove the rattling sports car into town. As we got out of his car in a deserted parking ramp, he told me, “My hands are normal…” I heard an implied “But,” and thought he’d now proceed to introduce me to some grotesque secret about his body. Instead he locked his classic car from the outside, using the key in both doors, and led me to dinner.
There were the troughs where students ate pizza or ribs or burgers or stir-fry, and then there were the establishments that had erected price barriers against all youth, where you could sit and talk. J.J. took us to one of the quiet ones, a small Italian place dedicated to romance. We sat by a frosty window — right after sunset the air had turned chilly — at a table for two spread with checkered linen. We were early. A waiter went around lighting candles shoved into Chianti bottles. I waited for J.J. to talk about his sadness, but instead, while we drank the house wine and waited for the food, he asked me about Senator Thom. “I’m curious — I’m trying to pin you down,” he admitted. “Did you like the guy or hate him? Did you quit or get fired?”
“Finally. Someone crass enough to ask.”
“You’re not slapping my hand, are you?”
“No. Really. Nobody’s ever asked.”
“It’s just that he’s in the news right now. I saw him last night on the tube, dueling with journalists.”
Questions about the Senator’s ethics had come before the public recently. Not for the first time. “‘Fight every battle on TV,’” I quoted. “One of his mottoes. He’s got a million.”
J.J. said, “Many predict the end of his career.”
“Not me.”
“Did you accomplish anything? Working for him?”
“In D.C. I experienced what I once heard called ‘the temptation to be good.’ It’s a curse. As soon as it hit me I got confused. I still don’t know if, by quitting, I gave in to a bad temptation, or managed to resist a good one.”
“Wow. Sounds like Zen,” he said. “Am I supposed to make sense of it?”
“There’s a perfect stillness at the center of Washington,” I said, and he folded his hands before him with the pleasant air of someone stuck beside a psycho on a public bus. “It’s natural to talk about it in paradoxes,” I insisted. “Everything in the world is going on there, but nothing’s happening. It’s all essential, but it’s all completely pointless. The motives are virtuous, but whatever you do just stinks. And then you retire with great praise.”
“Well, we sort of guess all that, don’t we? So why did you enlist?”
“I’ve got a half-dozen explanations,” I said, “but I’ll give you the shortest one: It was financial. I was restless, and I was curious, but mainly I was just poor. I wanted to leave behind the pinchpenny life of a high-school teacher. The prospect of money somewhere down the line meant a lot to me.”
“But you didn’t get it.”
“I got a raise.”
“But you didn’t get rich.”
“No.”
“And you don’t care.”
“No. Not right now. Should I?”
“No,” he said. Then: “How much of a raise?”
“I went from the low thirties to — after two or three years — just about eighty thousand. Just under.”
“Hey. That’s not bad!”
“I was designated executive legal staff. That put me at the high end.”
“And how are your politics now? Or am I prying?”
“You mean, will I vote for Senator Thom?” The Controversial Senator Tom-Tom, he was called by his constituents. The Big Chief, he was also called. I had stayed with the Senator at first in the hope of having influence, later in the hope of being there on the day of his defeat, finally in the hope of gathering evidence to bring him down. But he was clean, and it wouldn’t be fair to omit saying that he was even a good man. It’s just that his principles were small and his horizon was November. He should have been a Republican, but he was a Democrat — why? Why not? I think very little of either party now, and I can’t understand how I ever managed to see any difference between them. Worst of all, somewhere in the middle of my visit to that planet, I’d misplaced my sense of humor about all this. Would I vote for Senator Thom?