The Merchants of Zion (9 page)

“Mhm,” she said, fixated on her phone.

The car arrived within a few minutes. “Where to?” asked the driver, an obese man with gel-sculpted hair.

“Manhattan,” she said, and gave the address. We exchanged numbers. “Call me?”

“You bet. Don't worry about Ruth. We're old enemies.”

“I'm not.” We kissed and she got into the car. It pulled away from the curb and screeched to a halt as a van zoomed by, honking. I wanted to go with her. Or back to The Den. Anywhere but my house, really. The further away the better. Ruth had a habit of touching down like a tornado, and when she dissipated you wouldn't know she'd been around but for the wreckage left behind. She'd done it three times before, and after the most recent incident I'd cut her out of my life. I cursed James, cursed myself for staying in New York after I graduated, and went back inside.

Ruth was on her phone. “She's cuuuute,” she said without looking up.

“Yeah, and you could have fucked it up.”

“I'm not 
that
 mean.”

“So, why are you here?”

“I'll tell you in a minute. But first let's catch-up,” she said, patting the empty space beside her on the couch. “So, what have you been up to? Anything exciting? I'd ask if there were any girls, but I figured that one out for myself.”

“Mary? I just met her last night.”

Over a year had passed since we'd last seen each other, but it could've been a day for all she cared. As she sat casually on the couch's edge, talking, I began to feel like an impostor in my own home. The room became part of her personal kingdom, like anywhere she went, had been, or would go.

She ignored my reticence, and gave me a broad recap of her life, beginning with recent events and tracing them back, so that people and places were introduced as immutable facts, devoid of context, below which a supporting scaffolding was slowly built.

For its obvious flaws (inevitable confusion, apparent reversal of cause and effect), her approach hewed close to reality. We have the greatest grasp of present, and as such its the only logical place to start a story. From the end you can construct a narrative towards the beginning, deriving explanatory power from disparate episodes that, at the moment of their occurrence, had no hint of their looming significance. Unfortunately, this demands more of the listener than beginning at a place and time chosen arbitrarily.

Ruth was having problems at her job. Who she worked for or what she did she neglected to explain. She had also broken off her engagement Kevin, a person I didn't know.

“You were engaged?” I protested. “And who's Kevin?”

“Oh my God. You've met him. Twice. At least. You're so impatient. Wait until I'm done before butting in, will ya?”

I waited.

“Basically, Kevin and working wasn't. We moved in together after he proposed—well, it was more like he moved in with me. Pretty soon I felt more like his mom than his fiancée. I always date the biggest babies. After about a month I couldn't take it anymore, and I got out of there. I left him with the apartment and moved in with Lena, do you remember her? She lived across the hall from me when we were freshmen.

“It all happened right after I got my promotion. Cliff I'm finally in front of the camera instead of behind it!” She bit her lower lip. “We'd been dating for... I think two months before that, for like a grand total of four months, including the engagement. My life was changing so much so fast. It was too much to take.

“I ran into Kevin while doing a shoot down on Wall Street. Have you been there in the past few years? It's really emptied out. Like, half the offices are abandoned. And no wonder. Those pumps, my God. They sound like the coming of the apocalypse. Hell's organ, I've heard city workers call them.”

“None of this explains why you're bothering me right here, right now.”

“In good time, dearie. So like I was saying, Kevin was with some firm, doing finance something, blah blah blah. When they start talking about work they might as well be speaking a different language. They make it up as they go along, if you ask me.

“I hadn't seen him since graduation, and he invited me out to dinner. It was so cute—I always knew he had a crush on me, and I thought he was going to cry when he asked. So of course I had to say yes, and then... yeah.”

“That's nice, but who is he? Did he go to Hudson?”

“Oh, right.” She snapped out of her reverie. “He bought me at that student auction. James and him took some of the same classes too, I think.”

“What's his name again?”

“Kevin. Kevin Lee.”

“Was it weird being engaged to someone with your last name?”

She slapped my arm. “At least I'm not chasing after college girls to make up for not getting any back in the day.”

“She's a senior.”

Ruth scoffed. “Yeah right. That girl isn't even twenty-one. I bet she was at whatever lame bar you go to because they don't card.” She twirled her hair, locked my gaze. Same old bullshit.

“There's nothing wrong with a place that'll let you drink without a credit check, three references, and your work history for the past five years. We like it that way, out here in the boonies. So what are you, some kind of propagandist now? Are you happy with your career choices?” It was hopeless. I'd meant to disengage, I knew there was no way I could win, but her barbed-wire tongue had caught.

“I do what I have to—that's what having a career means. Speaking of, how's yours? Still babysitting?” Glints of malice reflected in her eyes.

“I like to think I'm helping the world a little, or at least not actively hurting it. It's a good gig if you're capable of having a meaningful relationship with another human being.”

Upstairs, Dimitri's heavy footsteps as he lumbered into the bathroom.

“No mystery there. Once you're lonely... and unsuccessful enough, standards magically drop. I've seen it happen before.” She crossed her legs, and her skirt hiked up her thigh.

The sputtering of water as Dimitri turned on the shower.

“I suppose it's possible. But I wouldn't worry about it too much if I were you. It can only happen to people with souls. And you're wit? Rusty. Did Kevin never contradict you? No wonder he didn't last.” She dropped her sunglasses back over her face.

“Despite what you think, I like nice guys. Not jerks who always picks fights.” Her phone buzzed. “This is important. “Hi!... Hold on.” She covered the bottom with her hand and asked if there was somewhere she could speak privately.

“How long?” I asked.

“A while.” I told her she could go to my room, or outside. She chose the former, her skirt bouncing as she jogged up the stairs.

I checked my mail on the communal tablet. Spam and rejection letters. Several were form rejections and the rest were automatic responses informing me that reviewing submissions from public addresses was against company policy.

New unit sales? Nope.

I tabbed open The Cherry Tree, the sole newssite offered with our basic internet subscription. Users voted on the different stories, largely a collection of press scripts and authoritarian opinion pieces. They didn't publish anything controversial, and on top of that I was pretty sure the voting system was rigged. However, if you clicked through the first hundred results or so you could find user-submitted stories that were, on occasion, informative. I suppose it technically supported a free press.

I tapped on a headline that read “Fear and Loathing in California: Pampered college kids team up with drug gangs to overthrow local government.”

BERKELEY (California Free Press) – College students at the University of California, Berkeley are coordinating several political campaigns with the city's sizable immigrant community for elections this fall.

Students Creating Radicalism and Instituting Political Transformation (SCRIPT), a student-group dedicated to electoral reform, has found an unlikely ally in Berkeley's sizable Hispanic population. The coalition will be contesting seven positions up for election in October: four city council seats, comptroller, school board director, and the mayoralty.

Three students are running for city council. The other races will be contested by members of the Spanish speaking community. The organization's candidate for mayor is Renee Fyodorov, president of SCRIPT and lifelong Berkeley resident, whose parents are both professors at the University.

“We feel that Berkeley's government ignores the needs of its citizens in favor of those of a select elite. Working with the Berkeley's most disempowered citizens, SCRIPT seeks to create a city government that better reflects the priorities of its actual residents,” said Renee Fyodorov, a self-described Jacobin, in a statement.

Controversy erupted, however, when reporters discovered that five of the candidates running for office have criminal records. All five have served terms under Liberty Bell's Minuteman detainment program and Juan Lopez, the candidate for comptroller, spent two years in prison for human trafficking before being released under California's “Prisoner Amnesty Act,” which sought to curb government expenditures by releasing almost thirty percent of the state's prison population.

“I think it's ridiculous that a bunch of college kid are trying to get convicted felons elected into office. I appreciate that the students think they're helping, but frankly it's a little naïve. I trust the people of Berkeley to vote responsibly come October.” Said Robert Fitzgerald, Berkeley's current mayor.

Robert Fitzgerald said the city was investigating the immigration status of each candidate running for office, but had not arrived at any decisions regarding potential legal action.

Hank Fitzgerald is California Free Press's senior political correspondent. His latest book,
 Ninety-Six Corporate Slogans That'll Knock You Off Your Chair
, will be released in August.

The shower turned off, and Dimitri shut himself in his room. I dawdled on the internet, becoming a wikiexpert on early twentieth-century Russian biology. While reading, I heard a slight jingle. James's keys had slipped into the crevice between couch-frame and cushion.

Twenty minutes later he was banging on the door. I let him stew a bit. The noise became louder, the beat more rapid, and as the door swung open he almost hit me in the face. I dangled the keys in front of his face and he snatched them away.

“Expecting anyone?” I asked

Shifty-eyed, he shrugged. “...no one in particular. Why? Did someone stop by?”

“Hey, have you ever heard of Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov? I was reading on—”

“No, and I could care less who she is. Yo, did you score with that girl last night?”

“Um...You were awake when I got back?”

“No, but I woke up when you two tried to fuck on the stairs.”

“Oh yeah?... I don't really... Ruth is in my room. She's on the phone.”

He brushed past me. I followed, figuring I was privy to their scheming if it was occurring in my bedroom. James entered without knocking. Ruth was sitting on my bed with my journal open in her lap. She snapped it shut. I marched over and grabbed it from her.

“Are you serious?”

“I was just...” she stammered, then simply said, “Sorry.” I set the journal on top of my bookshelf, high enough to be hidden from sight and beyond the reach of anyone shorter than myself.

“It was open. I didn't mean—”

“Yeah, I'm sure.” Her gaze was fixated on the ground, and her refusal to make eye contact infuriated me more than her most acidic remarks. I was working myself into righteous state of indignation; I'd yell at her until she started yelling back.

But James wasn't going to allow me to interfere with his plans. Pointing at the condom wrappers, he said, “Two condoms! Way to go buddy. Did you steal them from my stash? Heh-heh-heh.”

“Quit it, James.” Ruth said quietly.

“Right. So...” He glanced over at me, unwilling to continue.

“If you're talking business, can you do it somewhere else?” If he wanted to rob me of my catharsis, fine. As long as they left me alone.

They agreed, and went downstairs. I threw away the condom wrappers and, fuming, paced back and forth across the ten feet of my room. It didn't help. Outside, some kids were kicking a soccer ball around in the street. They too failed to lift my spirits. I should've known better than to let James stay here. Of course he was going to be trouble. And now with the arrival of Ruth it was the terribleness college all over again.

The low murmur of their plotting floated upstairs, and I shut my door. I grabbed 
The Merchants of Zion
 from my shelf. The pages of the back half of the book had puffed up like a bird in winter, but aside from that it had weathered the tabletop coffee event well.

I couldn't get past the first paragraph, when Brian Anderson describes landing in the People's Airport in Kingston. The thought of Ruth and James was driving me to distraction, and I wanted to know what they were talking about. I tossed the book on my bed and went to impose on their lives like they had mine.

They were at the kitchen table. Ruth's back was to me and James was across from her. “It's simple, really,” he said while she scrolled through a document on the tablet.

“What're you doing here?” James asked angrily.

“It's my house. I can go wherever I want.”

“Are you seven or something?”

Ruth turned. “It's fine. He can stay.” The flippant girl familiar to me had been replaced by a stranger who was all business. The warmth her face normally radiated was focused into the disintegration ray of a corporate executive. I pitied any interns—or co-workers—blocking the path of business-Ruth. Innocent bystanders in her career crusade.

James continued. “The climate for private investment is terrible right now. But it's not the market. The market's great. Things are so fucked up right now that anyone with an IQ over seventy can make a founder's million, easy. And I've got the business plan. I've got the investors. I've got the fucking talent. But it's not enough. You know how it is, with Liberty Bell and what not. You're not allowed to sneeze without proper paperwork. But the right leverage, properly applied, and closed gates pop open like Cliff's sister's legs.” He took the tablet from Ruth and pulled up a series of graphs.