Heathern (7 page)

"In a number of places."

"It's so easy to go global these days," said Thatcher.
"Only limit is how far you can see. Think of it, son.
Hundreds of millions of people everywhere and every one
of them listening to you. You can give peace to troubled
minds. Help groups settle their differences. Solve the
problems of tomorrow today. Get that camera in front of
you and a few satellites and it's all yours-"

"Thatcher," Bernard said, interrupting, "don't overstate-"

"Think of what things might be like today if TV'd been
invented twenty years earlier."

"Television has great power to confound and distract,"
said Macaffrey. "It saps the soul. I have no desire for
unnatural congress."

"Most people'd kill and eat their grandmothers to get on
TV," said Thatcher. "Worse, even. We'll start you at six thou
per year and see how it goes. No more having to preach to
gimpy kids from Farmingdale, that's for sure." Bernard and
Susie looked no less stricken than I must have appeared; I
made two per year, and Bernard not that much more.
"Appropriate raises with suitable results. Fair and equitable. We scratch your back, you scratch ours. Everybody
comes out ahead."

"You want me to make people render unto Caesar what
Caesar already has," said Macaffrey. "Not much point in
that, Mister Dryden. I'm sure you'll get along fine without
me." Turning, Macaffrey went to the door, and left.

"What's this?" Thatcher said, watching him leave.

"I think he's saying no," said Bernard.

Susie laughed, flushing so with color that I thought her
happiness might kill her. "Found a smart one for a change,"
she said.

"Thinks he is," said Thatcher. Having seen his seduction
foiled, he appeared now to be toying with fantasies of rape.

"He obviously doesn't want to be bothered," I said. "Leave him alone. Hire an actor for your plots. Weren't you
telling me how well that's worked before?"

"Thatcher obviously feels he needs this kernel of winsome sincerity," Bernard said, "to grow his new crop of
threats."

"You can't get an actor for this kind of gig," said
Thatcher. "Be like a white boy singing the blues. We'll play
it by ear. I got a hunch he'll come around when he gets the
right prompting." As he turned to me he paused, as if to
make me more aware of how soon I would learn of my
expanded role in this drama.

Susie spoke to her husband as she got up to leave. "I'm
going to the infirmary to check on Jake. Did you have to
make Gus do that?"

"It's what we pay 'em for."

That afternoon I stopped by Bernard's office, suspecting
I'd never see Macaffrey again, finding it impossible to
remove him from my mind. Bernard sat surrounded by
remnants of his personality: a photo of his wife, a Clio
award he used as a paperweight, a pencil sketch of their late
son, who was in a coma for a year before he died. Bernard,
maker of millions-old millions-was bankrupt when he
signed on at Dryco; I still had my jewelry. In the center of
his desk was a brass-colored pen and pencil set in the shape
of Dealey Plaza.

"You're here to see our newest commercial," he said as I
entered.

"Am I?"

"Sweetness, overseeing new projects requires that you
feign interest even in the inanimate ones. Here we go."

His set was a flat screen on the far wall; pressing the
remote he rolled the spot, which not so much played as
ricocheted. Sequential images flashed on during the first
twenty seconds, coming too quick to grasp individually but
showing myriad aspects of the worst of our world; the music backgrounding was the orchestral run swelling along the
scale as it led to the bridge in "A Day in the Life." Before the
mind overloaded the sound and picture changed, the music
segued into a full chorus singing the "Song of joy" from
Beethoven's Ninth; the blurs vanished into clean clouds
seen at angel's altitude, the light aglow in bright blue air,
sunrays lending that Nuremberg touch. As the company's
motto superimposed itself onto the clouds it seemed to rise
from the depths of heaven.

D R Y C O

Worry not. Wonder not.

"Does it mean anything?" I asked, feeling as if a grenade
had gone off in my head.

"Does the signifier need the sign? It's meaning-packed at
the core level. We've entered it for several awards-"

"It's unreal even for television, Bernard."

He pulled clippings from a folder on his desk. "Unreal,"
he said. "Listen to what we have here. Elvis appears on
Mexican woman's taco, hundreds come to be healed.
Pregnant by alien, woman sues NASA. Teacher at
Dartmouth divides polisci class into Gestapo and Jews to
illustrate the limits of power-three dead. All of this is just
from last week's Times. What's the second leading cause of
death among white American teenagers?"

"Boredom?"

"Peripherally," he said. "Autoerotic asphyxiation." Men
tapped into inexhaustible strength so long as they possessed a battery of irrelevant facts; Bernard owned more
than I could count. Men had a way of using their facts to
propel them toward imagination, and not to truth. "You
couldn't make it up."

"I need to talk to you," I said.

"Work-related?" he asked, shutting off the set.

"Coincidentally."

"Pity," he sighed. "This involves Thatcher's new avatar?
At least it keeps him distracted--

"I've never seen anyone get under your skin so."

"Half-baked Jesus freak," said Bernard. "Too stupid to
lie."

"You hate him because you couldn't outtalk him," I said.
"It's so obvious." Bernard's mood was changeable as
tropical weather, and when he glared I feared I'd roused a
typhoon. He didn't blow; the moment passed. "Bernard,
what if you'd gotten so sick of working here you couldn't
look at yourself in the morning?"

"Where are the mirrors?" he asked, with mimic gestures
delineating the room.

"I've got to get away from this," I said. "I spend all my
time doing nothing. I see no one but him. It's driving me
crazy."

"A benefit of the position," he said. Bernard never
responded as I might have preferred, but unlike all others
he always listened. "You arrived at any preliminary decisions yet? Been examining options? What have you done
besides complain?"

"Avi thinks I should live with my reality."

"Gets tricky after awhile, doesn't it? Jobs, people, fish, all
rot after three days. Say you quit. What happens?"

"No income. I lose my apartment. I'm out on the street."

He nodded. "If you get yourself fired?"

"The same."

"If you find another job and then quit?" Bernard asked.
"Shouldn't leave one job until you have another one lined
up, you know."

"I'd still be working for him."

"What if you request a horizontal promotion?" he asked.
"Not in the sense with which you're most recently familiar-"

"Transferred where?" I asked. "Data? I'd be blind in a
month."

"You could always go on Workfare," said Bernard. "Enter
a shelter. One way or the other, you wouldn't be there
long."

"People get by with less than I have-"

"People eat their dead in Brooklyn," he said. "Thatcher's
not the worst man I've known. It's bound to happen
eventually, so you should enjoy yourself while you can-"

"Some mornings I wake up and just want to run away," I
said. "Anywhere. Get in a car and drive and keep on
driving."

"Through our great and good land?" His face brightened
as if he'd already received his awards. "You've flown over it,
sweetness. I've been there. You think New York's bad? The
people alone'd give you the willies. They smile the whole
time they're bringing the axe down."

"Something's happening to me, Bernard," I said. "I don't
know what. It's as if somebody else is running away with
me-"

"You're getting older," he said; Bernard always listened,
not always intelligently. "Avi's a sensible sort on occasion.
Pay attention to what he tells you. Ignore the worst and do
your job well. Forget the day as it passes. Enjoy your life as
it is."

"That makes me no better than they are," I said. "Worse,
because I don't feel as they do."

"Maybe you do and don't want to face it," he said.
"These things sneak up on you, you know. Get that look off
your face, sweetness, you wanted inspiration? I'm no messiah. I can't tell a crystal from a crack vial." He read his
appointment book, his glasses low on his nose. "Pity me,
my angel, I have to roll in the gutter with the mayor tonight.
He's demanding specific dates as to when the Army might
be expected to pacify Queens and I have to leave the date as
being sometime during the twenty-first century. He's been
causing so much annoyance of late."

"You see no other options for me?"

"See any mirrors?"

"Travelready?" Jake asked, appearing at my office door as
I prepared to leave. It was after eight.

"All set," I said. Whenever I left late, alone, Jake assured
my safety. Somehow I intimidated him; though never
loquacious, he seemed especially numbtongued around me.
Jake's was a prodigal's soul; his divine talents so influenced
his every action and word as to overwhelm any would-be
friend. I noticed a volume of Shakespeare, rather than the
expected truncheon, stuffed into his jacket pocket.

"Gus teaches you literature?" I asked as we rode down.

"AO," he said. "Litcrit twicecovered this month."

"So many wonderful characters," I said. Jake's presence
aroused in me a deeply buried instinct that was still
conceivably maternal. "You have any favorites?"

"Ariel."

A car waited at the curb to carry me home. Before we
reached it I heard my name called; there was no forgetting
Macaffrey's voice. He walked toward us, across our building's plaza; Jake, recognizing him, allowed him to get to us.

"You haven't been out here all day?" I asked.

"I came back." In the streetlight his face held a hundred
years' lines. "Would you walk with me?"

Run was what I wanted to do. "Yes," I said, hearing a
stranger speak for me. "Jake, I'll be going a different way
tonight. I'll see you Monday."

Jake remained where he stood, cautious as a cat. For the
first time I noticed the bone-white cast gloving his finger
and, suggesting no medical purpose, the scalpel attached to
the tip.

"Tell the driver to go on, Jake," I said. "I'll be all right."

"You're chancing," he said, his sea-changing voice sometimes soprano, sometimes tenor, this moment unexpectedly clear and deep. Jake had only turned fourteen. "You know
who lights the lights."

"Worry not," I said, cheerfully corporate. "Have a good
weekend."

When we walked away there came an instant of silence,
and then he cried out in higher pitch, perhaps only making
sure that I still heard him. "Joanna-"

"Jake?" That must have pleased him; without responding, he went inside to go home.

With Macaffrey I wandered down Broad Street's gully.
Small buildings plugged the rifts in the range, seeming no
more than pebbles eroded from the sides of their mother
boulders. Billboards of two years' vintage or older stood
atop their low roofs. One sold the winner of the most recent
Presidential election, and his face faded a little more each
time I passed. Vice President once, he was shot before the
last day of March, not more than a month and a half beyond
his inauguration. His Vice President died five weeks after
being sworn in, when Air Force One collided with a
sightseeing helicopter over old Shea Stadium. His successor, dumb old Charlie, tried to escape on the day of the
crash; after the jets forced his plane to the ground the crowd
awaiting, seeing at last a reason to vote, affirmed that he be
soundly beaten in their election. His successor and Thatcher
worked something out that suited the Drydens for three
months; Gus settled matters in Seattle. The present President, the fifth to take office that year, appreciated whose
butter smeared his bread.

"You'd never guess what your company does from the
name," said Macaffrey. "What do you do for them?"

"Less and less," I said. "Nominally I oversee new
projects."

"Like me?" he asked. "You must stay busy. They get that
little fellow fixed up all right? I don't think he looked too
kindly on your going off with me."

"Jake takes his job seriously," I said. "Gus took him in off the street as an apprentice a year ago. He's grateful. Why
were you out there waiting?"

"Nowhere else to go," he said.

"I'd think your schedule'd be booked--

"On the way back this afternoon I stopped to get
something to eat. When I got back to the school it'd been
closed by order of the Army as a disorderly house. It's a
subtle approach, I'll admit."

We stood there for a moment as I estimated what I'd
done. So many wings, so many flies, and my hands so hard
at my work that I wondered if I still knew, at all times, what
they did. "I'm so sorry," I said. "Thatcher thinks he can
bully anyone into doing what he wants."

"He can," said Macaffrey. "I suppose he thinks he wants
me."

"So you've reconsidered," I said. "Well, what choice you
got. They've left for the weekend, but I can get them,
explain you came back to see-"

"To see you," he said. I hoped I wasn't blushing, but my
skin reddens even when someone calls me by my first
name. Craning my head, I looked at anything but
Macaffrey. When I was young and visited the city with my
parents, I remembered how I could look down any of the
cross streets and see a river; I glanced into an alley-wide
street whose vista was not of water, but the wall of a
riverside tower resembling twenty thousand elevator buttons stacked one atop the other.

"Why?"

"We have a mutual interest."

Thus far he differed from other men I'd known only in
that he apparently believed what he said at all times, and
not solely when it was convenient. "I am sorry you lost your
job. Those poor children-"