The Inner City (9 page)

The green shelf below it had sprouted up a foot or so. Anselm had a smile on his face. “Is that a plant?” Patricia asked. She had an urge to touch it but the police blocked the way.

Anselm’s smile increased. “An office plant,” he said. “Evergreen.”

She liked the mass and decisiveness of the large people, as anyone would who had always been seen as irrelevant; she liked how they brought with them a sense of turnover and vitality and a lack of cant. They would not pretend they were good for the economy or good for the average man or woman, she thought; they would not have secret accounts or back room deals or documents that covered their lies with tired, boring, overworked words. There was a little bit of outlaw about them, and a little bit of saviour. She had to talk to herself for a moment to admit that it was the outlaw part that appealed the most, and she was too old for outlawry—or so she had thought.

Roland moved off and some of the large people went with him, moving down side streets to the back of some commercial buildings. They walked slowly, looking at surfaces and signs. Ciceline bent down to look at a browned bush and some browned weeds; she turned, walked back a few yards, and knocked over a fire hydrant to water them.

Farther on they caught up to some of the ones who had broken off from the group earlier. The man in casual dress—the one who wore a sports jacket rather than a suit—faced the side of a grooved, white stone building, his body right smack up against the ridges, so tight that Patricia thought it must be painful. His arms were splayed out, his fingers in the channels around each stone. Those fingers, she saw, were very long, stretching along the ridges—even as she watched they stretched further, inching along and, she thought, catching in the small textures of the material. Yes, adhering. His fingers were turning into vines. His body pressed and flattened into the building, his face tightened into a pale sunflower, his suit changed into leaves, his trunk into a stalk, even as she watched, so that she had to squint to see what was left of him, still hidden behind the growth. A shoot rose from the top of his head, sliding up to the second-floor windows.

Anselm saw her gaze. “He’ll make his way in, under the concrete, into the beams, around the windows and into the walls. As they walk around, sure that the floors are solid, he’ll be licking at the materials, putting out a leaf or a pointed tendril.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Water and sun?” she asked.

“He’ll find water easily; there are pipes and sinks. And the windows—windows will find the sun for him.”

Her mind became filled with the image of the plant spreading and pushing its way through the walls, the floors, its relentless small separations loosening a bolt, a beam. “It will bring the building down,” she said.

“Everything comes down eventually,” he replied.

“No one will know about it. In time.”

“That’s the problem with time. There’s never enough time in the present to know the present. We keep growing.”

“Someone could get hurt.”

“Someone always gets hurt. It’s the fault of time, which always pushes to the end. Doesn’t it? Always to the end.”

She winced, suddenly aware of her own push to the end. She tucked in the edges of her own thinking, to compensate. Nature always took the long view, and the long view had no sorrow. Personally, she didn’t like sorrow either.

They were heading out of town again, back, she supposed, to the area where they had originally grown. Was it over? she wondered with faint despair. She had hoped for so much more.

They passed a gas station, where two of the large people stepped away from the group. Patricia saw a large woman plant a bamboo-like stalk next to a drainpipe; she saw a large man leave his newspaper against a pump. But there was no confrontation; and she was disappointed. Were the thrills of the day already done?

The remaining large people moved off a side road that Patricia knew led towards the town dump. When they reached it, they all spread out and she lost sight of Roland. She saw Anselm skirt around the edge of the pit and followed him into the hardscrabble brush around it. She found him bent over a black bag of garbage, pushing it gently, scraping away at the packed soil around it.

“Anselm?” she asked gently, and he looked at her and nodded. She came up and leaned over the garbage, but as she studied it, she saw that it had a root. She said, “It’s a plant?” and he answered, “It’s a new kind of plant.” She pushed at it and it yielded slightly, as a heavy bag of garbage would do. “But why?” she asked finally.

“They won’t notice it,” he said.

Anselm tapped the plant gently, even (Patricia thought) affectionately. “Have you planted a lot?” she asked. She looked at him, cocking her head. Had he worn a hat? Had his hair been longer? What had happened to the coffee cup and newspapers he’d held? She looked away, viewing the landfill, looking not into the pit but along the sides, where here and there the large people moved and stopped, sowing seeds, leaving roots. She liked the idea of the rest of them leaving traces of full-force green in among the rust and oilcans, among the cardboard boxes and plastic bottles.

Anselm was looking at her. “Our time is almost over.”

“You mean for today?” she asked fearfully. The idea that tomorrow would come and go without them was ferociously sad.

“Yes, today is over for us,” he said, and she appreciated the delicacy of his answer. It didn’t sound like he regretted it; it sounded like the day was enough for him, a concept that made Patricia shiver. The large people met up again, and she noted that they looked a little frayed, and that various items of theirs were gone. The hats, for instance, and the newspapers and coffee cups, and a handkerchief poking out of a pocket.

The sun hung low in the sky as they gathered on a spot beyond the garbage dump, listening to the keening of the seagulls swirling in the air. Roland was missing; it was Anselm and Ciceline and a few others. They moved languidly away from the dump to a small stand of trees. There they stood until one by one they sat down or leaned against a tree trunk. Patricia sat with them as the sunset bleached the sky. They were no longer large; they had lost bulk and seemed to shrivel in front of her. She saw their bodies relax and their hands grow still. Once they were completely settled, their arms and features arranged, and their eyes shut, Patricia watched over them until the sunset and the moon began to rise. By then, their figures were dim and slumped, and she decided she didn’t want to watch them as they slid back into the earth. But she did want something of theirs to take forward, so she bent and plucked off the buttons on their shirts and jackets. By midnight they were thin as leaves upon the ground, and she left.

The next day she went back to where she had first found them and planted buttons in the ground, got mulch and spread it around, and began to grow herbs around and between them, hoping that soon there would be another crop. People passing by noted her efforts, and the small shapes of flowers and herbs on the set of the hill, and thought nothing of it, for old women like to tend their gardens; what else is there for them to do as time advances and nature takes its course?

A survey I conducted on Water Street concludes that 58 percent of Americans think it is probably 58 degrees out, while 22 think it is probably 54, and the remainder aren’t sure.

For the first time in weather history this month, the percentage of people thinking it is 58 degrees is exactly 58. This happens, we are told, on average of once every six months. You won’t see that happening again until probably late fall or early winter, although polls also show that a majority of people think there won’t be any winter next year at all.

That was the gist of my segment on last night’s news. Today I got called into the office. “We’re getting complaints,” the news manager said. He’s a fat man and one ear is lower than the other, giving him a quizzical look. “People say your segments are insulting.”

“How many people said that? Maybe they’re just the kind of people who complain. You have to ask the people who
don’t
complain what they think.”

“No, I don’t,” the manager said. “I don’t have to do anything.”

“Poor choice of words,” I conceded. “I merely meant: balance. We strive for balance.”

“No, we don’t,” the manager said.

“What do you want, sir?” I asked humbly.

“Relevance. Nobody wants a poll on what the temperature might be. They want to know what the temperature
is
, and move on to sports.”

I bowed my head.

And by the way, how accurate are the polls? We asked 40 people and 20 said not accurate and 20 said accurate. Which means, according to our off-screen analyst, that any survey, tally, census, or sampling of the public would itself be only half-accurate, since the public is divided in the concept of accuracy itself and is therefore unreliable.

But is this really so? We asked a former employee of Burton & Pudge Poll Company, which compiles statistics on the surveys themselves, how surveys are measured. This employee, who prefers to remain anonymous, says that polls in general get three different results if the interviewee is asked the same question in three different ways. In response, Burton & Pudge representatives stated that this in itself points out the refinements of the polling process itself, which recognizes that only 30 percent of respondents hear all the words in a sentence, a figure that has been verified by having test subjects write down all the words in a sentence in reverse order so as to eliminate rote repetition. Ten percent do not write down the word “not” in a sentence that contains it.

On the other hand, 13 percent put it in when it wasn’t there to begin with.

This is how the polling industry comes up with the plus-or-minus 3 percent variance, since misunderstandings on either side of the scale are 3 percent away from cancelling themselves out.

I was invited to the office again. The manager said, “That was not what we had in mind. Polls should be fun. If they can’t be fun, what’s the point of it?”

I considered that, and thought that was a very good observation.

According to research by Wallup and Pye Interview Associates, facial expression is more accurate than verbal expression, at least when the face itself is aware it is lying. Most times it is not lying and then all we want to know is: does a flat face like what we’re saying or not? That’s simple enough.

Sticking one’s tongue out is a no; smiling is a yes, unless the eyes are squinting, in which case it’s no again. A shake of the head, no; a nod, yes. But beyond that—what is the nose saying? (Flaring, sniffing, snorting?) We have also calibrated the ears, since some people, sociopaths especially, confine their telling expressions to the earlobe. They may pass all the tests checking the muscles of the lips, the eyebrows, the eyelids, the nostril, but the ear tightens and the lobe clenches. That is a lie.

“The ear?” the co-anchor said, suspiciously.

We can also track your voice, you know; we can tell the truth of what you’re saying.

“The ear?” he repeated. “I don’t believe the ear even has muscles.”

“I don’t care about that, really. Maybe it’s the cartilage that quivers.”

Ha.

He waved me off, also a telling gesture, but a little blunt. It takes no special education to understand that.

I turned to address him, sharing my airtime. “Did you know the way you dress also reveals a lot? And I don’t mean, do you have style, do you have money. I mean, this is a person who has no imagination, this is a person who fantasizes. Okay, you say, that’s easy. But I must add, when you lie, your clothes don’t fit as well. Unless you stay absolutely still, and that’s a dead giveaway. A person who doesn’t shift around during interrogation is a person hiding something.”

“Interrogation?”

“Well yes, what did you think I was talking about?”

His eyes narrowed. He slowly put his hand in his pocket. As if he had something, yes. He thought he had an instrument that could deflect me. His nostrils flared.

His ear twitched.

I was getting the hang of being called into the office. I hung my head immediately and said, “Boss, what should I do?”

“You have to know what the public wants,” he said. “You have to have the knack for it. What is it that gets our goat? Scandal, crime, the all-chocolate diet. Death and taxes, they get everyone interested. Do something on taxes.”

I’m not interested in taxes.

The final test of any poll of course is what the dead say about dying. That’s the poll we want and never get. The dead, as far as polls are concerned, have nothing to say about death once the body freezes up, but right after death, especially that moment we like to call “instantaneous death,” we find it is still possible to get a few questions in.

Shortly after a local criminal was guillotined, his head in a basket, a sharply observant reporter noticed that the eyes of the head were slowly closing. He rushed to the head with a microphone.

“Excuse me, Sir, how do you feel?” the reporter asked.

The eyes flickered open and stared at the reporter. There was a slight movement of the tongue.

The reporter was excited. “If you feel pain, Sir, blink your eyes! Blink on a scale of one to ten to tell us how much pain.” He stuck his microphone at the head’s lips. Very slowly the eyes looked at the reporter then closed halfway again and stayed there.

The cameraman was standing by the dead criminal’s wife, conducting his own interview. “How do you feel now that your husband has been executed, ma’am?” he asked.

But what if the head was lying? This was a criminal, after all. What if it was nothing more than a bunch of nerve endings firing off without meaning anything? Go back to the science of physiognomy (about which 40 percent of the population says there is no such science, but 60 percent of the population knows someone or other who can “tell” when someone else is lying) and use its principles to decide whether the decapitated head was telling the truth when it fluttered its eyes.

Physiognomy says a glance to the right means an imaginative thought process. A glance to the left means a recall of memory.

The head glanced to the right. Now, if this were a poker game that would be considered a “tell” if the person did it autonomically in certain situations. Was this a “tell” from the dead head?

In other words, do the dead realize that their opinions still matter?

“Boss?” I asked politely. “Was that what you had in mind?”

“From now on,” he said roughly. “No live segments. We’re going to review your tapes and decide if they air.”

“You didn’t like it?” I was shocked.

“There are no guillotine executions in New Jersey,” he said. “There never have been guillotine executions in New Jersey.”

“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “The people still need to know.”

According to a clairvoyant I consulted, the afterlife is just like this life, only without bodies. The poor are still poor, though this time they are also poor in spirit.

“How does that work?” I asked. “I mean, how can you be poor if there’s no money?”

“Oh, there’s money,” she said. “It just doesn’t weigh anything. Besides,
we
put the value on things. It’s not like gold has any particular absolute value. We just like it. That’s in this world,” she said. “There are 10,000 worlds, but not really that much variety. Some are physical, some are spiritual. And they all have rich and poor people.”

“What’s the point?”

“No point. It simply is. Of course, you’ll like it better if you’re rich in all the worlds.”

“So we
can
bring it with us?” I asked. “How do we prepare to be rich in the next life? Is there some kind of investment opportunity?”

I didn’t believe her, of course; I could feel it creeping out of my voice. She was offended.

“You’ll learn that your attitude always goes with you,” she said stiffly.

I rapped on my table just for the effect. “I think I hear some advice,” I said. “Do you know who it’s from? I want to do a background check.”

And she shut up. That was the end of the segment.

I wouldn’t be surprised if there are scams beyond the grave. Some people will believe anything; other people will take advantage of anything.

So, beliefs. What are people willing to believe in? Some believe they have come from another planet; some believe they are going to one. Some believe they will gain their enemies’ strengths by eating their enemies’ hearts. Others try to claim the soul by, say, sprinkling water on the head or cutting off a bit of skin.

Almost everyone believes in some kind of conspiracy. Like my boss, I think he’s working against me.

“You can make fun of the clairvoyants—hell, everyone makes fun of those. But what was that crack about stealing the soul? That was anti-religious. That kills ratings.”

“Anti-religious?” I asked, aghast. “I just wanted to point out similarities, you know, parallels.”

“Cannibalism and baptism?”

“I’m interested in the metaphysics.”

“No.”

“No?”

“We’re not showing it.”

We sat together in a companionable way. “Well, what
can
I cover? That has to do with metaphysics?”

“I don’t even know what metaphysics is in this day and age,” the boss muttered. “But you seem to like death. So I’m putting you in the morgue. Anytime someone dies, you write up the memorial and you find the clips.”

“Let me think about it.”

“That’s really all there is,” he said. “And you may have to do some typing besides.”

I thought about it. I would still be on-camera, I could talk about the deaths of people who were either admirable or famous; I could wear dark colours, which I like very much. I could roam through photo morgues on company time. I could quote from poems about death. I could insist these dead people held interesting beliefs. Hell, everyone believes in something interesting sometime in their lives.

We need work, meaningful work, if we are to remake all 10,000 worlds. This is what I told the boss. “I’m yours,” I said. “But give me a little latitude here. Let me ask how people feel about the death, whether it was the right thing or not.”

“The right thing?” his mouth dropped open.

“Sometimes death is wrong,” I said sternly.

He stared at me and sighed. “You can give me anything you want, as long as you cover their lifetimes. Do it that way: give me their lives, then give me their deaths.”

I was very pleased. “I’ll tell you what I think about your death right now,” I said.

“No,” he said. “I’d like to wait for that.”

People once believed that the image of the murderer was etched on the retina of the victim’s eyes, like a photographic plate. Like a little camera snapping its own evidence. It must have come from all that “eyes are the mirror of the soul” business. The mirror caught the last reflection and saved it.

No, wait. The eyes are the windows to the soul, I think. So what if it works the other way—the eyes record what the soul sees, it doesn’t record what the body sees? No one ever found the murderer’s image in the victim’s eyes, but did they find something else? Did they see bits and pieces of things that made no sense? A line here, a curve there, none of which added up to anything individually? We are always leaving hieroglyphics, aren’t we? Faery stiles, crop circles, Aztec ridges, Nazca lines. Little nicks on cave walls, rocks piled in patterns, dots and dashes. So why not messages for those left behind? It’s hard to break that human compulsion to say one more thing.

What if there
are
imprints on the eyes of the dead after all, and they form a message when you put them all together? It’s very exciting, when you see a puzzle for the first time; when you sense its solution. Human instinct; human intelligence; the human need to organize information and pass it on. What are polls for but to find the patterns we’re secretly storing? What are books and films and TV shows and reports from all over the world except to find the pattern? Who says we would stop the trail, the interpretation, the insight, the comment, when all is said and done? Those who talk never stop talking. Those who reason never stop reasoning.

So I took the job. The boss said Morgues and I went to the morgues—not the library of clippings that he meant but the actual morgues. I spoke to the attendants, who told me that they kept music on to counter their fear of hearing whispers. They don’t like the silence because it seems to be waiting. But then they laughed and they winked at each other.

I interviewed them myself and I taped them and I took their pictures. They want to believe they might be famous someday, though we never discussed for what.

“Boss, this is interesting,” I said. “They dress the dead and take their pictures. They pose them. The families request it. The families of the long-lost ask to see them in a natural pose.”

“Disgusting,” he said. “Wait. Maybe an expose?”

But I won’t expose them. The attendants let me in after hours. They don’t say a word as I open the eyes of the dead and take their picture. I zoom in on the iris, on the retina, I snap them looking back at me on high-speed, on digital. I run home and I blow the photos up, looking for the shapes in the back of their eyes, the shapes that reflect something. Already I have pieced together, from selections of their eyes, the angle of a room, a white room with a doorway and a hall. The doorway has crystal doors, opened and not quite flat to the side. The hallway—I only see a little bit of the hallway and there is a shadow of a hand in it, just beyond the opened door. I can’t see who is throwing that shadow. But I will find it out.