Burning Down George Orwell's House (9 page)

Helen did everything in her power to console him, but Ray
spent his days in a trance of rage and denial. He trudged from the condo to the office, and from the office back to the condo. He didn't bother going home some evenings and that didn't sit very well with her, but he felt better when he was safely bunkered down at work. The tedium of spreadsheets and oil price forecasts, the microtrends of American consumer spending habits, distracted Ray from his own inner life. He felt his thought processes growing jumbled and spaghetti-like. Something unfixable had snapped inside him and the awareness of it made it worse.

With nothing to bury, he felt no compulsion to attend the funeral mass. Becky and her husband soon moved in with their mother and—coincidence maybe—they were unable to conceive a child. He had become the last male Welter. The survival or cessation of the entire family name now rested with him. That was the kind of grown-up burden he had spent his entire life not thinking about.

That he stayed at his desk through personal tragedy brought him to the attention of the Logos corporate honchos, but what the board took for stoic dedication to the craft of strategic branding, Ray knew to be abject fear: of facing his father's absence, of his mother's heartbreak, and of the carcinogens in her water, of the distance he felt expanding between himself and his own good nature. He tried not to let his intense grief affect Helen, but from the look on her face while she slept he could tell that he was failing. He had snapped at her a few times, but had never known why. She
continued to do everything in her power to help him march through each day.

The employees who had survived the explosion were offered and accepted work as day laborers, digging holes and filling them again until out-of-state demolition engineers arrived to peel acres of contaminated topsoil from what had been among the earth's most fertile farmland, ground that now contained Ray's cracked genetic code in the form of his father's smithereens. The crew cemented over the accident site while every regulatory oversight organization dragged its feet, which were snared in red tape and a hundred-mile-long fence of glazed razor wire.

The aftermath was even worse: bright yellow lines painted upon the site to delineate countless parking spaces surrounding a mecca of convenient, one-stop shopping where his mother now bought aseasonal produce and the disposable electronics Big Brother used to track her movements and convince her to buy even more junk. Becky implored Ray to visit, but he just couldn't. He had his own problems. For the first time in his life, Ray felt something less than indestructible.

Around that time, Ray also started to have some serious reservations about the whole Oil Hogg endeavor. He kept Flora's email in his inbox, where he looked at it every time he powered on a computer or his phone. His depression grew in direct proportion to the sales figures. When he could no longer avoid the practical realities behind his success, he took to drinking more scotch. What he had done
was
morally reprehensible.

Helen urged him to quit and Ray considered it, but he simply couldn't justify doing so. The money was too good; there was no way he could give those paychecks up. He could imagine what his father would have said. His old man would have been disgusted by the very thought of his only son and heir leaving a high paying job in order to save a few trees. It was unthinkable.

Whether the domestic strife resulted from his growing disillusionment with Logos or vice versa, he couldn't say. Helen still sometimes managed to soothe Ray's anxiety attacks with carefully chosen lines of verse, with CDs of Satie and Chopin, but she grew frustrated with his despondency and rededicated herself to her research, to her tenure portfolio, to the students she conferenced with from a treadmill at the campus rec center.

If she was asleep when he got home he would pour a glass of scotch or three to unwind on the balcony. The weather didn't matter. Late at night, Lake Michigan looked like … like nothing. It was an enormous, black expanse and it reminded him that he lived every day at the very end of the world. A short boat ride and he could fall off the edge of the earth, down down down down down through the limitless oblivion of the cosmos, and that comforted him. He wouldn't see his wife for days at a time.

During a particularly vindictive quarrel, Ray used a few words that once spoken aloud could never be revoked. She asked him to move out and for the first time in months there
was no reason to argue with her. The next day, he leased a corner apartment on the fifteenth floor of a gutted and renovated 1927 high-rise pictured in every architectural guide to Chicago. The deposit and first month's rent paid for the illusion of antiquity; behind the ornate, brick superstructure a network of coaxial cables and wireless receptors provided every manner of computerized and televisionary convenience. The place did not include a parking spot, however, so he left his SUV at the condo and for the next several months he was glad to not have to look at it.

H
ELEN CALLED VERY EARLY
one Saturday morning, which was a bit odd. She didn't leave a message. The coffee-maker had shut itself off and Ray poured a tepid cup. Bud had also sent a series of texts overnight imploring him out for an afternoon of beer and circus. There would be an important hockey game on TV, but Ray wasn't much of a sports fan. He caught his reflection in the door of the refrigerator while reaching for the half and half: he needed a haircut and his face couldn't decide if it was growing a beard or not.
Don't you own a razor?
his dad would have asked, joking but not really joking.

She picked up after the first ring. “It's me,” Ray said.

“I know,” Helen said. “Your name comes up on the screen.”

Good morning to you too. “What's going on?”

There was some variety of crazy, avant-garde singing in the background. It sounded like an argument among three opera singers.

“I need you to come get your SUV. It's an eyesore. I want it out of here.”

“We haven't spoken in, what, three weeks and you call me at seven
A.M
. to talk about my truck?”

“Listen, would you please get rid of it?”

The singers shouted and chirped and barked. They might have had a broken harpsichord or piano and some kind of rusted horn accompanying them.

“What am I supposed to do, park it on the street?”

“That's not my problem.”

It wasn't like Helen to pick a fight for no reason. Everything had become subtext with her. Something was up her ass, but it wasn't the truck. “What's gotten into you?”

“It's just that … Listen, let's just forget it.”

“What is this about, Helen? Do you want me to come over? I can be there in fifteen minutes.”

“No! … No, I shouldn't have called. I sent you an email,” she said and hung up.

He dumped the coffee onto the dishes piled in the sink and listened to a message from Flora. “Hi, Ray?” Her voice cheered him up. When her internship ended, Flora had, with some reluctance, agreed to accept a permanent position.

Bud had once admitted that his frequent fantasies about Flora involved them running away together to a Hawaiian island and taking with them a lifetime supply of tequila and birth-control pills. Ray thought she was attractive, yes, but that was due more to her considerable intellect than the
perfect round butt that Bud wanted to “eat an Italian beef sandwich off of.”

“In retrospect,” she had told his voice mail, “I was wrong about something I wrote in the market summary I turned in today. I looked at the reports again and they make a lot more sense now. I hope it's okay if I email you some revisions, because I already did. If you prefer I can get you hard copies this weekend. Let me know, okay? Okay. Bye!”

He switched his laptop on and deleted the spam that had accumulated overnight. He and Helen had taken to communicating almost exclusively via email. The situation was ridiculous, but for the short term it was best to abide by her wishes. Her use of his full name and the salutatory colon indicated the things that this email would not be: personal, apologetic, salubrious, tender, forgiving, decent. She wanted him to come to her office for an appointment and proposed a meeting time.

An
appointment
? He now needed a goddamn appointment to see his wife?

He texted Bud back:

S
EE YOU THERE
.

He opened the dishwasher, removed all the glassware that had sat in there so long that it had become dirty again, and then calculated the dishes' best possible arrangement within the limited and awkwardly arranged rack space. Nothing seemed to fit right. Every angle was terrible. Next, he filled three garbage bags with pizza boxes and beer bottles and
carried them down the hall to the chute like a derelict Santa Claus preparing to dump them in some bad girl's chimney. They landed fifteen stories below with a crash of broken glass. He pulled the sheets off the bed and stuffed them in a mesh Kletzski's Kleaners laundry sack and did the same with all the stray clothes.

While scanning the news, he spooned a bowl of cold cereal into his mouth. Every day another columnist or editorial writer made another superficial reference to George Orwell: Big Brother-this and thoughtcrime-that. Orwell hadn't only predicted the current state of affairs, he had also provided innumerable journalists with a series of metaphors vague enough to pass as zodiac horoscopes.

Orwell was everywhere.

Ray pulled on a T-shirt and a pair of jeans, then tore a white Oxford out of the dry cleaner's sterile plastic. He owned dozens of similar shirts, each with a different pattern of stains and amount of fraying at the collar. The oldest of them was little more than a rag tied to a wire hanger; it was his favorite shirt. Each Christmas, Easter, and birthday another identical one arrived in the mail courtesy of his mother. She had always
been a creature of habit, but after the explosion had progressed toward the genuinely eccentric. Dementia had entered the picture. Exchanging three items every year was easier than attempting to explain to her yet again that he had put on a few pounds over the past fifteen years. It was nice that she still recognized his voice on the phone, but that was just a matter of time.

To get to the dry cleaner's Ray had to face the weekend crowd of bad-art browsers and fake-fur-wearing nannies who zoomed their strollers down the sidewalk like they were racing chariots around ancient Sparta. Off-duty cubicle farmers jostled for sidewalk space with panhandlers and homeless war veterans and proud new parents bubbling over with moneyed angst. The gelato stand and microbrewery crowds spilled onto the sidewalks. Exclusive downtown galleries had opened local branches and brought with them chain coffee shops and national retailers of sweatshop-made clothing. It was all so depressing. He joined in the march-step choreography of the herd and carried his laundry through the crowds and to the mostly blind Polish lady down the street.

The ten-minute walk took him through an area that a decade earlier had tipped over to full-blown gentrification. During the last half century the neighborhood had mutated from a bohunk ghetto cut off from Chicago's downtown by the river's Main Branch into a post–GI Bill slum then into a Reagan Renaissance yuppie heaven of renovated row homes and chain boutiques selling mass-produced expressions of
individuality. Considering that he had also contributed to the forced displacement and resettlement of the natives, Ray knew he was in no position to complain about the neighborhood colonialism. The local artistic scene had deteriorated after the painters and sculptors had been priced out of their studios by those, like himself, able and willing to pay exorbitant rent for the privilege of living among painters and sculptors.

A construction crew had razed an entire building since he had come home from work last night. A dirt field remained, now adorned with a billboard promising the imminent grand opening of another organic-foods franchise. He couldn't recall what establishment had occupied the space just fourteen hours earlier. Life continued on. Someone had keyed the words “Oil Hogg” into the hood of an SUV parked in front of a sushi restaurant.

The dry cleaner's door had a string of brass bells hanging from the inside handle. Mrs. Kletzski's portable black-and-white TV was cranked up to its maximum, distorted volume.

“Raymond, where have you been hiding?”

“Hello, Mrs. Kletzski. How are you?”

“I've had some of your shirts ready for six weeks!”

“Right—I completely forgot about those.”

“I'm not responsible for garments left over six weeks!”

“How much do I owe you?”

“Do you have your ticket?”

“No, Mrs. Kletzski. I never have my ticket, remember?”

“You never have your ticket! Let me see if I can find your slip.”

He never saw other customers in the place, yet behind Mrs. Kletzski hung a serpentine of plastic-sheathed clothes. He wanted to go back there one day, maybe hide from the world for a few hours. There was definitely something wrong with him. He was thirty-three years old and wanted to do nothing more than play amid other people's cleaned clothes.

“Welter! Eighteen dollars and twelve cents.”

Mrs. Kletzski's pricing obeyed no specific logic. Identical loads could vary by as much as twenty dollars. He gave her a credit card. “I'm not going home right now. Can I leave these with you and get them later?”

“Sign here. This is your copy. I'm not responsible for garments left over six weeks!”

“I'll get them later today, Mrs. Kletzski, I promise. Just the usual for these.” He lifted the laundry sacks onto the counter.

“What is it?”

“Sheets, towels. Clothes.”