Manhattan Loverboy (11 page)
“Fuck beer. You people come in here and think you can just take over. She makes more money in a day than I’ll make in a lifetime. Why does she want my apartment?” The snake with a suit for skin took out a hundred dollar bill and extended it to me.
“A hundred dollars?! Who do I look like—Harpo Marx?”
While I protested, he took out a small vial of coke and the next month’s issue of
Penthouse
, which hadn’t yet hit the newsstands. Opening the pages, he put the magazine on the desk. Then on the edge of his desk he laid a long, thin line of coke. It looked like a fine strand of white hair.
“You cheapskate, that’s the most paltry line of coke I’ve ever seen.”
“It’s pure,” he said, handing me a gold-plated tube. I hadn’t gotten my share in the ’80s, so I snorted it and…”Ewwwwwweeeee!”
“There’s more,” he said. I remember popping things, pills and herbs and glasses of fine liquor with exotic larvae submerged at the bottom. He put something in my hand, and I signed a treaty to give Panama Canal back to the Lilliputians. And then I remember looking at 3-D nudes of women who screwed presidential candidates or ministers or chancellors or something. Porn from Cleopatra right on up. Pink dishwashing gloves turned inside out. And then Amy walked back in the room and thanked Whitlock and asked for my keys, which she returned a second later, saying that she had had them copied; another fine white line, and she was asking when to send two carpenters named Mason and Dixon to build an Iron Curtain down the middle of my apartment, with her on the Serbian side and me on the Croatian. I couldn’t stop smiling, into the street, accelerating right into the middle of a million lives that I’d never know, launched through subway throngs for the rush hour, weaving like a wave runner, leaving all in my wake bobbing up and down. I wasn’t going anywhere. It was just a pleasure cruise on the current of life, a scuba dive in the great ocean of mankind, feeling strange flesh—young and old, poor and middle class, hot and cold—pressed against mine. As the packed train stopped at Times Square, I developed a bizarre fear. Physicists have observed that when a big-ass star exhausts its nuclear fuel, it crushes together with such force that its gravity becomes inescapable. I kept finding myself at the center of this massive collapse, the black hole of this rush hour.
I had to prevent it or I’d be crushed into spaghetti. When the subway doors opened, people outside, free of manners, crushed inward. Those behind me, equally eager, pushed outward. The masses—I love ‘em—they rush for red lights, risking everything to capture a few seconds, only to get home and waste their lives.
I threw my arms across the frames of the sliding subway doors and held on like Samson, not allowing any of the crushing commuters behind me, or any of the commuters in front of me, to pass—a Spartan at Thermopylae. Finally, when the big boom occurred, I popped out like a champagne cork, flying right into one of those big metal pillars. I had an ear bleed. When I got home, I sat down, fell asleep, woke up, and sat down again. I dreamt that I’d just signed away my apartment, my life, and lord knows what else.
RELAX, YOU’RE
SOAKING IN IT
I was frequently sick with both systemic contaminations and mechanical fractures. I have broken limbs eight times (but I haven’t broken eight limbs). Sprains have been countless. Infections, both viral and bacterial, have been so frequent I have learned to function with them. I was a recognized face in the university health services office, and I popped a carousel of antibiotics because my bacterium would develop quick immunity. (The school nurse once tried to nickname me “Petri [Dish],” until I threatened her with a suit.) So it came as no surprise that the morning after the signing, to the sound of bumping and moaning, I awoke with a low-level fever and a sinus infection.
Amy was moving some boxes into my apartment with the help of her SWBs—Spry White Boys. They made the mistake of parking some boxes on the landing before hopping downstairs to the double-parked van to find a legitimate parking place. Quickly, I opened a box and fumbled through it for whatever dirt I could find. No topless beach photos or nights of photographic abandonment. The most interesting detail I could tweeze was a high school yearbook. I folded the box closed and took the album to my room. She graduated from Bismarck High, Bismarck, North Dakota. The Bismarck High Muskrats was the school’s varsity team. The Bismarck High Scream was the school paper. Finally, I located her picture. WOW!—Teeth like a rabbit. Eyes like a crow. Skin like a cobra. Flipping through the yearbook, I saw the nervous, humorless inscriptions of her freaky friends and checked out their vile visages. They were equally stilted and ingrown; runts of the litter, all.
Within the album were some recently snapped photographs, apparently from her tenth-year high school reunion. Group photos of the same old high school buddies revisited years later. In the same way that crappy apartments were renovated before their rents were inflated, her friends were now attractive. Details had been improved, hiding the structural flaws.
Mindlessly, I chewed on countless packets of sugar until my insulin level spiked and I started feeling incredibly lightheaded. I was worried when I accidentally drooled on one of the pages of her yearbook, so I quickly placed it back in the box still in the hall. Feverishly, I recalled my high school era. I had gone from ugly to uglier over the years (which is both natural and healthy; after all, we die at the end). Yet I remembered the others—that bespectacled group that looked a lot like Amy’s high school bunch.
As my temperature climbed, and the sinus infection migrated down my throat, I remembered something that had happened about a month ago while I was on a proofreading case. I was proofing a legal contract for a business located in Bismarck, North Dakota. An agricultural-research firm was filing for bankruptcy because a large tract of their land had somehow been contaminated due to a spill in a nearby chemical factory. Initially, I just assumed it was another radiation-waste debacle covered up by the Department of Energy.
A lawsuit was being handled by another firm, and I couldn’t get access to the dirty details. A corporate disaster is usually messy business: exposures, large-scale worker dismissals, whistle-blowers, government investigations, heavy fines, new legislation—all of this seemed to be part of the recipe. Lawsuits pour in from all directions. Yet, it seemed perversely odd how this particular Bismarck occurrence went against the grain. No one was dismissed or even transferred. Except for this one meager suit from this agricultural company, no one else was suing (which struck me as unpatriotic). No extensive investigation, or even mock investigation, was being conducted. Instead of being defensive or apologetic, their official statements seemed pat, curt, artful.
Awakening from my delirium of recollection to the realization that I was burning up, I took a bath in freezing water to try and bring my temperature down. From the tub I made a phone call to the local newspaper in Bismarck. Claiming to be a fellow correspondent, I learned additional details. All residential houses in the area had been purchased and emptied
before
the alleged spill—as if the spill had been anticipated. The incident occurred a couple years ago, but the area was still inaccessible.
The one actual detail that confirmed the nature of my suspicions was that the chemical company, as well as the Jasper Agricultural Company, were both held by the Merlin Corporation, a holding company that had as its parent—you guessed it—Whitlock Incorporated.
Eventually, I came to a point where I realized that I could learn no more unless I made an informal, investigative trip to Bismarck. Unfortunately, one of my great character flaws was that I could only do something up to the point that it required true courage. Beyond that, at the vital moment when action was required, I usually ended up watching a lot of television. By early afternoon, the infection had tendrilled down into my lungs.
Too exhausted and tuned-out to rise, I found myself marooned in a chair before the TV, watching an old rerun of
Bewitched
. I slipped between dreams and delirium, drinking flat, old beer and eating some Yodels from yesteryear. Where’d we be without preservatives?
As Samantha and Darren interacted, I thought about boarding a Greyhound bus. The ride would probably be hell. I daydreamed arriving in downtown Bismarck at eleven at night and hailing a cab. I envisioned the cab driver as looking like Larry, Darren’s white-haired, white-mustached, ass-licking/ass-kicking boss. I told him to rush me over to the Jasper Agriculture fields. He looked at me oddly. “That’s a long way away, stranger. How about a hotel until the sun comes up?”
“To the field I must go.”
“But it’s a six-hour drive,” he whined. “There’s a big cyclone fence around it.”
“There’s always a big cyclone fence! Look, either take me there or I’m getting out.” (My dream self didn’t take no for an answer.) I was about to open the car door. He gunned the engine and did what he did best—drove. It was a long and silent ride. The driver nervously tried locating a radio station, but we reached the point beyond all frequencies, just rolling fields of radiation. Finally, around 4:00 in the morning, we drove down a dirt road. There was a putrefying smell in the air. I knew I was near a great and macabre discovery. Soon we came to an empty field encircled in fencing. I gave Darren’s boss a hundred dollar bill.
Wordlessly, he took it, slipped it into his shirt pocket, and, with a blank, bloodless expression, zoomed away from that splotch of melanoma on the face of the earth. I struggled over the large fence and held my nose as I wandered around on the empty lot. There was a spongy feel to the earth, not just loose soil. After walking a bit, I soon became aware that my feet were wet. My eyes started to drool and burn. In the blurry distance I could see the outline of a huge silo. Behind it was a roofed area; I headed toward it. It wasn’t a building, just corrugated roof over a wall-less, empty frame that continued; stalls divided the space, but what the stalls were for wasn’t apparent.
After an hour or so, I started wheezing. I took out a white, monogrammed handkerchief, snot-free, and covered my mouth, intent on searching for whatever I could find. As the first rays of dawn came up (although admittedly there was never a sunset or night in my vision, just a sudden and brilliant dawn), I saw that a thick, purplish oil had soaked through my white socks and the cuffs of my pastel-colored pants. I was on a large field and was having increasing difficulty breathing. I realized, oddly, that I hadn’t seen a thing since I got there. There were no birds. No insects, nothing, just silence, me, the unclotting earth, and Canada (which happens to border North Dakota, a coincidence—probably).
Soon I was gasping for air. I realized that I had to get off the land quickly. I started running. I tripped, and my hands sank into the earth. When I pulled them out, they were covered with bloody oil. I started digging. After uncovering just several inches of earth, I found it: decomposing flesh, small patches and strips of it. Some of the fleshy patches had strands of hair. I also located shards of bones. I put a sample in my pants pocket and retraced my steps back to the dirt road. No sign of Larry the Cabby.
It was around noon by the time I got over the fence, covered with dirt and blood and oil and death. I hitchhiked back to the airport and took the next plane back to The City. People stared at me indiscreetly, as if I had just given birth in the plane’s bathroom, but my secret would be greater than that.
On the plane trip, I thought about the discovery. This was not a mass grave. It was a disposal sight. I could imagine it all. Somehow, one Walpurgisian night—probably foretold by Nostradamus (who also mentioned that the world would fold in 3097) and trance-channelers (many of whom were former suburban housewives)—thousands of malformed high school graduates from around the country had gathered together. Perhaps in the same manner that Spock was able to hear all his fellow Vulcans cry out as one before being destroyed, they, too, heard each other’s silent screams. They met under the corrugated roofs of the large empty barns, where only fields of hay surrounded them for miles; they gathered and vaguely recognized each other. Lugubrious, obsequious, they had seen each other for years, in hallways, lingering around doorways, at the optometrist, at the orthodontist, in all types of waiting rooms, waiting to have their bite and sight corrected. They slowly touched each other’s sores and lacerations. Rubbing their spindly bones and bad backs. They noticed the rope burns on their emotional wrists, extension-cord lashes on their misunderstood backs, and saw their asymmetrical faces covered with problematic and combination skin (dry
and
oily).
I could envision what occurred. Time was divided into long, arduous tactical conferences and strategy symposiums. They spent the night building, tinkering, hammering, and decimating.
I’m not saying this happened recently, or even ten years ago. (Maybe it only happened metaphorically.) It is foreseeable that they waited through the morass of Carter’s moralism and the last of the cumbersome disco age, a time of domestic polyester and third-world bullies: Ethiopia, Libya, Vietnam, and Iran.
