“Mom, stop. I don’t know. I’m just saying.”
“It’s amazing,” she said. “The passion is there. Everyone seems so excited about the Helix.”
“Are you seriously wondering why?”
He knew she was staring at the family photos ordered atop the piano — her, Max, Ned, year after year — because when she said, “No, not really,” it was plangent for all the ways those photos betokened what had been lost to them as a family.
“I gotta go, Mom,” he said. And even though she had not said bye, he hung up.
Esme turned off the TV. She was peeling a clementine. The rind was clotted under her nails and tinting them orange. She was not surprised news of ARDOR had gotten out. Security leaks were a D.C. special, ever since that megalomaniac sprung the Pentagon Papers. These days you couldn’t piss on a toilet seat without someone telling the Washington Post. Still, it pained her to imagine the project name on someone else’s lips and contextualized poorly. It wasn’t even her idea, this name, just some guy at the Joint Chiefs tapping the JANAP 299 for a suitable word, the irony being that these words traditionally hewed to projects that did not bear out their meaning (Manhattan Project, anyone?). And yet there it was, ARDOR, which classified Jim Bach’s stint to dismantle the Helix and its guru.
Esme heard a phone ring, but since it was not her phone — cell, inhouse, or the secure line — she looked up at screen two just as Anne-Janet considered the name on her caller ID — Do I answer? Do I have the stamina? Can I alchemize my mood from depressed to effervescent? — and then listened to the dial tone on the machine. Ned had hung up. Damn. Double damn, since now she couldn’t call him back. If she called him back, he’d know she was screening. What sort of a woman screens? A reclusive, awkward woman who doesn’t know how to wear makeup or to feather the underside of a man’s penis with her tongue.
Anne-Janet pressed her feet into Lyndon / Lady Bird slippers. They looked like cots wrapped in the American flag, and at the head of each, on a pillow, a rubber face that couldn’t sleep; the future of the country was on their minds.
She plunked on the couch and flipped on the TV, except that the TV was broken, what the fuck? She was big on visualization and tried, immediately, to picture herself at the bottom of the ocean among fish and kelp. It was placid there, and all was well. All was well except for the part where her TV was broken, and OH MY GOD, her TV was broken! Maybe the RCA cable had gotten loose. It was not loose. She checked her Internet connection and this, too, was out. So the cable was out in the building. Fixed tomorrow. Or the day after. An inconvenience for some; a fiasco for Anne-Janet. She did not even have a radio. So the question posed by this cable outage was: How will I ever fall asleep tonight and, more alarming, if I cannot sleep, how will I bear the solitude? Anne-Janet could not stand solitude. If left to her own thoughts, she would think of her dad, at which point she’d retreat so far into herself, no one would be able to get her out. And how can you expect to be loved when you can’t even be reached? Five nights out of six she slept on the couch so as to be with the TV. Other nights she listened to podcasts on her computer. The more boring the show, the better. She had taken to listening to a man share negotiating tips — how to haggle a raise — which knocked her out in eight to nine minutes. If the speaker was British, she would not last five. Academic men who touted God were her favorite — three minutes — followed closely by men who tracked wildlife in Africa. The whispering was key: Here we are looking at an African aoudad nursing her young.
Anne-Janet looked for a cassette player, a CD player, an iPod, knowing she did not own these conveniences. She picked up the phone. Maybe she could call a disconnected number and put the response on speakerphone. If you’d like to make a call, please hang up and dial again. Would that put her to sleep? She began to panic.
Esme logged the scene. She knew how to condense. 2315 hrs: Anne Janet Tabetha Riggs bursts into tears for fear of silent night.
After, she got in bed and thought it over. Ned would be happy to go to Cincinnati — plenty of cloud cover in the Midwest. And Anne-Janet, she’d be cake, too, Esme’s logic being that people who were dead inside would do most anything. This was true of Esme, and while there was a degree of faulty generalization in her estimate of the world, she’d never been wrong yet.
Two recruits down, two to go: Olgo and Bruce. Both men were planked across the ruin of their private lives — how hard could it be to entice them elsewhere?
She called Martin to schedule his magic. First thing tomorrow, 6 a.m.
Olgo Panjabi: Wresting accord from the teeth of hostility.
DOB 2.2.45 SS# 035-33-4932
Sunday! Day of rest for some, for others a carnival at a high school gym, where couples were wrecking and rebuilding each other’s lives with every toss of the bean.
Olgo was by the launch site. “I still wish you’d been there,” he said.
His wife dropped her mallet. She’d launched fifty frogs, though none at the pad of her aiming. “We celebrated before,” she said. “Who needs two birthday parties?”
“The Helix was there, which was interesting, I guess.”
“Really? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You would have come for the Helix and not me?”
“Don’t be silly. Did you see Thurlow Dan?”
He sighed. Scanned the gym for his granddaughter, who was just making her way back to them. Tennessee Panjabi Bach. She could stay at this carnival for hours; Olgo might not last another minute.
“The lunatic? No, I imagine he was at home, voodooing the president.”
She frowned. “Like you’d understand. That man is giving us purpose. Now stand back,” she said. “Here we go.”
She shimmied her rear and made to spit on her palms before gripping the mallet.
Tennessee laughed. Olgo turned away. Thurlow Dan was giving them purpose? He hated talk like that. Talk like that nicked the shared ethos of his marriage, which had been his pride to consolidate every day.
“Where’s my mom?” Tennessee said. “When’s she coming?”
He took her hand. They had been through this nine times. “She’s with your father. She’ll be here soon. Now, watch this.” He asked for a drumroll. Quiet, please. Kay uprose the mallet and whacked. She whacked and missed.
“I wanna try,” said Tennessee.
“In a sec,” Kay said. She hoisted the mallet and whacked. This time the resulting thwump meant contact between the mallet and her shin.
“Crap!” she said, and she covered her mouth.
“I wanna try!”
Kay’s T-shirt was gamy with sweat from the day’s play — bean toss, spill-the-milk, Skee-ball, down-a-clown — but still wearable so long as Tenn let go. And then, “In a sec. One more try for Grandma. One or two. Frog hop is my specialty.”
Whack. Whack, whack, whack, whack, whack, whack, whack.
Kay dropped the mallet and bent forward, hand to knee, panting. “I’m done,” she said, and she stood upright. Her lips were dry and notably chapped, given the dew that overspread her face. Ventilation here was poor. And the smell of laps and burpies rose up from the floorboards, no matter the Lysol charged to suppress it.
Olgo looked for the exits. As part of the school’s talent for child endangerment, it had blocked one door with a basketball net. The other door was near the bleachers. He tried to take Kay’s hand. In recent weeks, she had been cranky in ways too minor to dwell on but that, in sum, had come to seem alarming, and maybe indicative of bad health. He’d heard people could get testy apropos bad health. Like if her eyesight were shot and she couldn’t see the frog, wouldn’t she pound on it in denial? Or if her ears were wrecked and she couldn’t hear the phone? Last week it had rung twenty times before she picked up, Olgo calling from work to say he missed her — they still did this kind of thing — and Kay saying, “Well, maybe if you bought a better phone I could hear it; this phone is pitched for bats,” followed by a slamming of the phone into its cradle and the cradle into the fridge. Apparently, his wife had something she needed to work out.