I said that what the fuck was up was a stick up my ass named Barton. I tried to be funny about it.
“Something’s wrong with Stan,” said Barton to Torrentelli, when she came back. “He’s trying to be funny.”
Torrentelli took ahold of my hands like she was the pope.
“Come clean before the Lord God Jesus Pilsner,” she said.
Barton made the sign of the cross with a pint.
If I told them right then, I knew, I wouldn’t go.
I bowed my head in mock supplication. “I confess: I have no friends.”
“Only us two fuckfaces,” said Barton.
“Amen,” said Torrentelli.
The night before the flight my father called me twice. He left two voice mails that I didn’t listen to. While I packed my bag on the bed, I saw that I was shaking again. I said to myself: You are afraid to hear concern in his voice. You are afraid that what he says and how he says it will make you stay in this apartment in which you now live by yourself. You don’t want to stay in this apartment. You want to be a man who can move out.
Everything you are thinking you are thinking yourself into believing, I thought.
I winced at the smell of the sheets I hadn’t washed since T had moved out.
I washed the sheets.
I banked my uncle’s check.
I printed the ticket to T’s show.
I didn’t return the ring but I didn’t pack it.
I didn’t pack my phone.
I packed Sacred Centers: New Perspectives on North American Burial Mounds.
On the flight, I picked peanuts off my lap and ate them. The teenager next to me adjusted her pillow in such a way that it brushed the side of my face on purpose. When I looked at her she pointed to the floor, to the dropped peanuts I’d ignored.
“I’m allergic,” she said, sheepish.
I unbuckled and bent to pluck them up. An urge to weep kicked around on my face.
“Sorry,” we said at the same time.
31
Stanley Accompanies Manny to a Restaurant
Manny had been listening to my description of my uncle’s offer with interest, but acting otherwise. He’d traded my guidebook for Sacred Centers, and was thumbing through it, dwelling over diagrams.
There’d been no new phase in my uncle’s project.
Manny had continued to interrupt me, to redirect my responses. Although I’d only covered what he could’ve already known from T, I didn’t mention the marriage proposal or T’s move-out.
“That’s it,” I said.
He closed my book dismissively.
“And yet,” he said. “Why Prague?”
I opened another pop.
“Is it that your uncle, or your uncle’s species of art, is met in Prague with an appreciation not to be found in Chicago, a city home to unsophisticated hordes of hot-dog-chomping everymen?”
He elaborated, including an aside about “faux-tender tough-guy sentimentality.”
“Whereas Prague,” he said, “with its cultural maturity, with its history of occupation, can claim a long-standing appetite for subversives and satirists. For art that mocks and undermines. Consider the legends of Zito. Consider the puppet theater. Consider Kafka, Hašek, Čapek. Consider Jára Cimrman.”
He explained a recent national protest. I wasn’t able to understand what was being protested, or how and why Manny talked the way he did, or Manny. I didn’t want to, and I wasn’t supposed to—every word he spoke was a point scored in a game he was playing with himself.
His phone, in his pocket, trilled with a text.
“In what state did you discover this apartment?” he said.
I told him that the one change I’d made was to load the fridge with pop and beer. I didn’t tell him that Uncle Lech or a henchman artist had entered in my absence and switched the background on my laptop, that the place had had a pesticidal stink (now gone), or that the bedsheets were itchy to the touch.
I said, “By the way, the bed’s yours.”
Manny, picking at a crusty stain on the wall, paused to assess me. It was a deeply impersonal look, one I’d never seen him give to T. It made me want to pound him on the head with my can of pop.
I imagined pounding him on the head with my can of pop.
He said, “You are older than you used to be.”
“You aren’t.”
“Ne,” he agreed. “Restaurace, prosím!”
He picked a restaurant he’d seen on the way in, off-Square, but not by enough to be as inexpensive as it should have been. It was best, he argued, to begin one’s culinary explorations in establishments that would safely confirm one’s expectations. With such expectations secure, one could better risk the discovery of that most prized ephemerality, authenticity. We walked through Old Town Square. Manny described an inauthentic lunch in Florence that had enabled him to more completely appreciate an authentic dinner in Siena. Tourists strolled and lounged and posed for pictures, sitting at cafés or on cobblestones, content, weary, dreamy, bored, drunk, high. Some gathered aimlessly at an enormous monument out of which loomed ghostly oxidized copper figures. Others gathered expectantly at what looked like a medieval clock tower. “The Jan Hus Memorial,” said Manny, interrupting himself as we passed these landmarks, “the Astronomical Clock. Sacrifice and time.” The Square’s borders were beautiful town halls and churches, a cross-century display of architectural styles. I didn’t expect to feel anything in the Square, but I did, in spite of Manny: a sad grandeur that shamed me. In my life no such public space drew me to the center of my time. We left on side streets. The more they wended, the more they loosened, losing foot traffic. We found the restaurant and took lopsided stone steps down into it, way down, the dining room a dark cellar dressed up as a lodge. It smelled like the inside of a sausage. Stags’ heads and torches adorned the walls. Long tables buzzed with non-Czechs not speaking Czech. We were seated. Waiters in green aprons brought us water, pretzels, menus.
With the air of already knowing my answers, Manny solicited my opinion on the culture, cuisine, and character of the Czech people.
“What are your impressions, I wonder?”
I didn’t tell him that I’d wandered into ordinary everyday Prague or that I’d day-tripped to a magnificent ossuary in Kutná Hora. What I told him was that I hadn’t even been in the city for a day.
“Yes—what have you learned so far?”
32
Stanley Watches Manny Answer His Own Question
“The history of Prague is the history of three peoples, the Czechs, the Germans, and the Jews,” said Manny.
“The most economically influential people—my people—were the Germans,” said Manny.
“Today, Prague is controlled by American bankers,” said Manny.
“Some say that Prague is controlled by the Russian nouveau riche, but that impression has been propagated by American bankers,” said Manny.
“Since the Velvet Revolution, Prague has redirected its economy to tourism. Sixty-one percent of the city’s economic transactions are touristic.”
“Golden Praha!” said Manny.
“‘Praha’ refers to the Czech word for ‘threshold,’” said Manny.
“Like all Slavic tongues, Czech appears coarse on the page,” said Manny, presenting the menu, touching words, “hrášek—peas—květák—cauliflower. Pairs of consonants offensive to an English speaker. But in the mouths of the Czechs, the language sparkles. It is ice water.”
The unsmiling waiter returned with a notepad. I ordered, interrupting Manny.
Manny placed the exact same order: one half-liter of Krušovice Cerne, which the menu said was “The Royal Brewing Blackbeer,” and a plate of vepřo-knedlo-zalo, “the National dish proud of Pork and Dump Lings.” We shared looks of surprise. I’d never seen him eat and drink anything other than veggie wraps and Manhattans, and he’d never seen anyone come to the birthplace of the pilsner and not order it immediately.
“The Czechs cons
ume more pivo per capita than any other people,” said Manny. “You must drink the pilsner.”
The Krušovice came, dark and heady, full and rich. It tasted nutritious.
Manny raised his glass and toasted to T, to the work ethic that had placed her on the important proving ground that was this festival. She was on the verge of a moment that might turn out to be a switching station to a superior track. Here she would meet new enablers. They might do for her what no one she’d known before could.
I said, “Na zdrowie.”
“That’s Polish.”
I said no shit it was.
“Na zdraví,” said Manny, frowning.
He drank most of his beer in one swig, set his hands on his hips, and burped. The smell of what he’d had for lunch twisted in my face. New enablers were half of “talent,” he said. He was excited to press T for details on the young director-playwright she’d connected with, a rising star in the international theater community who’d been lauded for his experimental approach to addressing social issues.
“In his most recent play, he invites the audience to indict the actors. He appoints the audience to a position inside his narrative system of consequences.” Manny glanced at his watch. “T is there now.”
He said the playwright’s name and the name of the play. Last I’d talked to T, we’d planned to have a drink after her show, which was tomorrow night, and although I was hoping to touch base with her earlier than that, I didn’t expect to see her until then. Now it seemed important to see her sooner.
I suggested that we meet up with her after she was finished with tonight’s play.
Manny put on a cold smile. “She has already committed to a late dinner with the director-playwright.”
At the table next to us, a nicely dressed mass of English bros triple-fisted beer, whiskey, and champagne. It was a bachelor party. The bachelor, a handsome big-chinned man in a cracked plastic top hat, was loudly detailing the geography of his fiancée’s vagina.
“I learned that you have decided not to return to graduate school,” said Manny.
“I dropped out.”
“And your current search for employment?”
“I do construction part-time, mostly demo.”
“Demolition.”
“‘Demo’ is short for ‘demolition.’”
“Your field was anthropology.”
“Archaeological anthropology.”
“The social sciences,” he declared. “To seek the truth that is objective, until that truth objectively changes, one study at a time.”
I said that ancient cultures had reasons for doing the things they did. Many of these reasons were unknown to us. But the more evidence that we discovered, the more conclusions we could draw from studying that evidence; the more conclusions we collected, the closer we could come to the ancient cultures’ reasons behind even their most mysterious practices.
Manny said, “The social sciences: the process of the simplification of human society.”
“Truth is a process of simplification,” I said, quoting Dr. Madera.
Manny laughed.
33
Stanley Remembers Another Instance of Manny’s Laugh
We’d sat down to unlace our bowling shoes. I’d won both games we’d played. The fluorescent lights came on, bleaching the bowling alley into looking like a high school basement.
Manny was laughing at a story T was telling.
T pantomimed a scared person peeking into a box.
Manny laughed much harder, his laughter ascending itself as if it were its own staircase. This was T’s favorite “Mannyism”: watching it, she snorted. A smile began to pry at my face and I fought it like you fight a sneeze. Manny removed his glasses, wiped at tears.
I asked Manny’s friend Inna how she was liking America.
“I do not,” she said. “But I do not like many places.”
She popped a cigarette in her mouth and went outside to smoke it. I followed her. I’d quit a week ago but asked for one.
“This is all I have,” she said, showing me her empty pack.
It was cold. A bus across the street sucked its doors shut and took off, its passengers well-lit, bobbing.
Inna offered me a drag and I accepted, breathing deep. She motioned for me to hang on to it for a while. I remembered that she was a student and asked her what she studied.
“International finance systems,” she said. “But I do not think that I will finish my dissertation.”
“What’s stopping you.”
“Myself.”
She smiled. I gave her back her cigarette.
“I have a question about T’s appearance,” she said.
Everyone in my family and all of my friends had at some point asked about T’s ethnic background, most of them prefacing the question with a wrong guess, which T found annoying, which I increasingly found annoying, so I was grateful for Inna’s don’t-presume-anything approach. I said that one of T’s parents was black and Puerto Rican and one was Chinese and white mutt.
Inna said no, she wanted to know was it challenging to love a beautiful woman.
I felt ashamed. I apologized. “Yes,” I said, though I’d meant to say no.
“As challenging as it is to love a woman who is not?”
Inna had a pretty face with troubled skin, and her way of carrying herself, though not unattractive, wasn’t attractive to me. But when she said this, my blood jumped. Her eyes had deepened with a meaning I wasn’t sure I caught.
I said that whoever you happened to love was hard to love.
To say that a challenging activity was challenging was to not say anything, she said. She began to tell a story about an American poet she used to know, a man who’d staggered in and out of love with her, who’d once spent nine straight hours riding the ring that was the St. Petersburg subway, alone, writing what he said were “secret missile love poems.”
I asked a question, I forgot what, then T and Manny emerged, exuberant, reminiscing:
The time they dumped a can of night crawlers into the bully Kevin Rovik’s backpack!
The time they Photoshopped the bully Kevin Rovik’s yearbook picture onto an image of the sweaty body of Richard Simmons, whom he resembled, and left copies all over school!
The time they planted a peanut-butter-and-dogshit sandwich in the bully Kevin Rovik’s lunch bag, disguised as his daily PBJ—wrapped in the same wax paper and on the same wheat bread and halved on the same diagonal—and he bit into it!
They always carried off every scheme and never were suspected once and wouldn’t ever regret what they did to the bully Kevin Rovik, that ogre, that lumbering dumbfuck, that proud-of-his-own-stubborn-ignorance shitsack, who had it coming!
T slugged Manny in the arm, harder than she’d slug me, but for the same reason. He laughed his laugh to the next floor, and then to the roof.
34
Stanley Eats a Meal and Takes a Lengthy Constitutional with Manny
His laughter went up a story but was nowhere near the roof.
Our food came: gravy-rich slabs of roast pork, spongy dumplings, and a heap of hot sauerkraut. We picked up our forks and knives. Manny chewed with his eyes closed and his mouth open, visibly restraining himself from moaning with pleasure in a way that was worse than if he’d actually been moaning with pleasure.
We finished our beers at the same time, halfway through our plates, and when the waiter appeared at that very instant, Manny ordered two pilsners, prosím. I stopped the waiter and told him in English that I wanted another Krušovice. He scratched it on his notepad.
Manny explained his position on the relationship between truth and complexity. His argument, which he’d been developing as a “subtle secondary thesis” in his dissertation, was that the standard for objective-seeming subjective truths was the extent to which they discretely honored complexity. Did you need a truth to feel true? Then that truth must address complexity, but indirectly, in the dark, under the table. He licked gravy from between t
he tines of his fork. I asked why overtness had to be avoided, why directness didn’t lead effectively to truth. Pleased, he referenced theorist after theorist, only one I’d heard of, as if his goal wasn’t so much to prove his point as it was to prove how thoroughly he knew the names of the people related to his point. Manny attended a historically prestigious university in Berlin, and although I used to know what he studied, all I could remember at the moment was T saying that he wanted to be a terrible diplomat, like his mother.
“You want to be a terrible diplomat,” I said.
“Diplomats are robots in crisis. They are required by their government to go against their programming, to do the things that authentic human beings do not prefer to do. I will do business.”
“Business is authentic.”
“Only money is authentic. Money, and actors.”
He argued that authenticity was representation: coins, bills, and credit cards weren’t wealth itself, they represented it, and in this representation achieved an identity more concrete than the identity of the abstract power they represented. The representation actually was the power it represented, whereas the power it represented was literally immaterial. So too with actors: most people, to most people, were fictional. Actors made strangers more real than real strangers.
The Made-Up Man Page 8
