by Tito Perdue
“I need this book. Need it far more than you do.”
“We were talking about your job.”
“Christ, I’ve been looking for this exact edition for I don’t know how long.”
“Job.”
Leland looked about and lowered his voice. “Insurance.”
Both men laughed out loud, including a fat man going through a shelf of obsolete engineering texts.
“Insurance! You come out of the Academy with the second-best record and now you’re in insurance?”
“But I’m going back to ’Bama real soon.”
“Don’t tell me that. That’s where I was going!”
“Plenty of room down there.”
“Yes! And plenty of room up here, too. All that room and look who I’m talking to.”
“Lee.”
“I know your name!”
“And I used to know yours, too.” (As if he hadn’t already been quite handsome enough, this “Philip” so-called, had turned into an Apollonian with bright golden hair. Lee wished to vomit.)
“You still do, of course.” (Know Philip’s name.) “You really haven’t changed at all have you?”
The fat man had come to join them. “Everybody changes,” he pointed out.
“Certainly,” said Philip, coming to the man’s support. And then, turning to Lee. “I don’t suppose you ever figured I’d turn out to be as gorgeous as I am. Right?”
“Calls himself ‘gorgeous’!” the fat man said. “I’m getting the fuck out of here!”
And did.
They retired, the two scholars, to a highly picturesque cafe that had been carefully decorated to look that way. The waitress had been decorated, too, and wore a Tyrolean blouse calculated to make a person think about one of the most touristic parts of Europe. Having seated themselves opposite each other — there was no choice in the matter — both persons sat silently for a time reading the script seemingly indicted in the surface of their coffees.
“So,” said Lee. “I suppose you’re fluent now in Japanese. I knew you’d never learn that language.”
“’Insurance?’” you said. (His interlocutor looked like a scarecrow, or at least in the mind of Philip. He had perhaps seen some hard years, and Philip for a moment almost began to feel sympathy for him.)
“Too difficult, Japanese?” Leland inquired. “No, I can understand that. Requires a special kind of mind, those eastern tongues.” (His interlocutor looked like a 25th-century prototype who had acquired all manner of impossible skills. For a moment Lee almost began to experience some little admiration for the son-of-a-bitch.)
That was when one of the men (we don’t know which) summoned the waitress (an uppity woman with an ornament of some sort in her nose), and asked for further coffee. The hour was late, however, and instead of coffee the twain found themselves referred back to the sidewalk. Saying nothing, they strolled for half a block in the subsequent silence.
“Maybe we ought to go back and pay her for all that coffee,” Philip recommended.
“And doughnuts? Naw.”
They continued forward. Lee observed that he was a good inch or more taller than the other person, and almost certainly the stronger. This other person, by contrast, had an uncanny face that seemed to express an enviable serenity that Leland would have liked to experience for an hour or two before it was too late. In the meantime, they had penetrated an all-night tavern full of clients of various description.
“Christ!” said Lee. “Look at that one.”
“Indeed. Rabelais could have made good use of him.”
“What do you think a person like that actually wants?”
“And look at that one in the yellow shirt.”
“Jesus!”
“What we see here, Lee, is the final collapse in our country of any capacity for transcendent values.”
“Or any values at all, I would have said.”
“Does that include bad values?”
“No, no; I’m perfectly willing to make an exception for them.”
“The horror of it. How can a country like this subsist?”
“Country without values? The real horror is that it probably will subsist.”
Both men chuckled. Obviously, they were getting along very well this evening. Or early morning, to be slightly more precise about it. Philip’s watch showed, in round numbers, that it was almost two o’clock.
“I notice you’re wearing a wedding ring.”
“I am. We got a matching set in Toledo for just eight dollars.”
“Eight?”
“Five for me; three for her.”
“Very generous of you.”
“Yes it was. It represented more than half our assets.”
“And where is she now? Can’t help but notice that she’s not standing here alongside you at this particular juncture in your life.”
“At work.”
“I see. You give her a three-dollar ring and then send her out to work. Good, good. And you, you don’t really work in insurance, do you?”
“Look at that one over by the jukebox. He may be the worst one yet!”
The people reluctantly made way for them as they searched out a vacant table near the rear. It smelled of beer in there, which was not even to mention the stink of burnt hamburger meat. Neither of the boys was willing to ascribe anything to the two likely whores positioned at the bar; it was simply too difficult in those days to discriminate between different grades of women.
Lee called for a black German beer that seemed to repulse his tablemate. Philip, by a very revealing contrast, ordered and received a white wine that gave off a rainbow effect when viewed from just the proper angle. “OK,” the linguist said at last. “Tell me about her.”
Lee frowned and thought long and hard about it, wrinkling his somewhat simian brow. Finally, having finished the better part of the beer and disdaining the worse, he spoke approximately as follows:
“Héloise.”
“Oh yes?”
“A palpable Héloise, albeit better-looking. No, I’m telling you. And that nose! You could put this woman in a reeducation camp run by liberals, and she wouldn’t talk no matter what they did.”
“Is this true, Lee?”
“Bet your sweet ass it is! The last in the line that runs back to Andromache and her kind.”
“I envy you.”
“Well of course. Moreover, I couldn’t help but notice that you wear just one ring, and even that was granted by some wretched honorary society.”
“For Greek. Remember how much trouble you had with that?”
“Possibly. I also remember that five-mile footrace.”
“I wasn’t feeling well that day.”
“Really! For all I know you might be telling the truth.”
Clearly both men were feeling marginally less pleased with each other. To give his companion time to recover his aplomb, Lee went to the men’s room and, after perusing a few examples of some really extraordinary graffiti, relieved himself in his peculiar way that created so much untoward splatter in so many places. No soap, of course, and the toilet made gastric noises that could be heard several miles away. But would Philip still be there when Leland went to join him? He had other things to say, and other tests to uncover how much or how little Philip’s knowledge might have expanded, if at all, since adolescent days.
“You don’t have a wife, I believe you said. So how do you… get by?” Lee asked, accepting the first cigarette he had accepted in years.
“Oh, I have a wife alright. It’s just that we aren’t married.”
“I see. Expensive, is it, a wife like that?”
“Horribly.”
Two puffs of that noxious weed and Leland began to experience a headache. But rather than drown the butt in the remnants of his beer, he set it astride the sugar dispenser to burn itself out. Both men now sat back with folded arms and glared at one another.
“We were cheated, I think — coming to life in this period. Shoot, we m
ight just as easily have fallen into Greece, or Renaissance Italy, or heck the belle époque even.”
“Or the Safavid regime in Persia. No, actually I just like the sound of that.”
“Safavids? You should see some of the old-time coinage they used to issue!”
“The Persian coinage has never, and I repeat never, possessed the aesthetic appeal of the Baltic area’s. Never.”
“Are you insane? No, I need to know right now.”
“The day’s coming, Lee, when mundane things, stamps even, and new coinage, will be as lovely as if they’d been designed by the kind of artisans we used to see in certain periods.”
“And so you really are insane. Why, good Lord, man, this country doesn’t care about stuff like that! The last new postage stamp I’ve seen had Bugs Bunny on it!”
“It simply means we’re getting nearer to that great big revolution needed by people like me.”
“I don’t need anything?”
“A society that understands equality as a social disease.”
“I’m listening.”
“And a restrained population. Fifty million is not too few for a territory as squeezed as this one.”
“Fifty.” (Lee took out his little pad and gel-tipped pen and made a note.)
“All white.”
“Absolutely. Except maybe a few Japanese?”
“Ruled by a tiny number of anonymous people, the best we can find.”
“Austere people, you bet. Vowed to poverty.”
“Philologists and opera singers. Genius and poverty.”
“But not so poor they can’t afford a book now and again.”
“Yeah, but who’ll select these geniuses? We don’t want the masses getting anywhere near to that kind of power.”
“True. And we don’t want these ‘guardians’ of ours to be a self-perpetuating bunch either.”
“Hold it. You’re going too fast.” (He wrote slowly, Lee. Always a slow person, he was a victimizer of time, as he had admitted on at least one occasion.) “But what if one of our administrators goes awry? Turns out to be a pragmatist or something?”
“Oh, we’ll take care of him, no doubt about that.”
“We?”
“Somebody has to do it.”
“But what if one of us goes awry?”
“You already have.”
Both men chuckled, but Philip more than Lee.
“Because of my arrogance?”
“Your arrogance? See here, man, my arrogance is much bigger than yours!”
“How big is yours?”
They consumed further beer. There were now but three other patrons in that establishment, and at least one of them was becoming plainly annoyed by the ideology he heard coming from the corner. Finally, Lee said this:
“We’ll need some kind of procedures of some sort. As for culture, I think we should just let the masses wallow in their own ignorance.”
“They will in any case.”
“Keep ’em stupefied. So they won’t interfere with people like us.”
“Quite right. We’ll have to have the death penalty, too, and not be afraid to use it.” He whipped out a spiral-bound address book with the dimensions of about five inches by seven. As smart as he was, he still couldn’t find a writing instrument in any of the pockets of that great big suit of his. That was when the irritated man spoke up loud and clear:
“You want stupefied, come on outside, right? I’ll show ya stupefied!”
Half-drunk, Lee turned on the man, saying: “Oh, yes? Listen, I can out-argue anybody in this whole bar put together!”
They strolled down Claudio Street, moving slowly past a candy store and then a cosmetics outlet with a thousand tubes of lipstick on display, each stick a different hue.
“See what I mean?” the linguist said, nodding at the cosmetics. (His own hair, carefully manicured, looked like a certain old-time fleece known to both of them by way of Grecian literature.) “Vanity of vanities!” (It was 4:58 am.)
“Not at all,” Lee rejoined. “They’re simply trying, women and girls, to carry out their mission.”
“Being?”
“Why, to single out the men to whom they will consecrate their lives. I expected you to know that.” Suddenly Lee jumped back, avoiding a broken hypodermic needle lying in full open view. A man was sleeping in the alley, very lucky the weather was as warm as it was.
“They” (women) “might have been like that at one point. Now they want to be men themselves.”
“Hideous. But believe me, history won’t tolerate such behavior much longer.”
They were throwing ideas at each other, a game of tennis as it were, enough to keep Lee at least, and maybe Philip as well, sleepless for the next several days and nights. Suddenly the linguist stepped on a .22 caliber casing and without Leland’s aid would surely have fallen on his face. They had arrived at a concrete bench with a vagrant newspaper lying on it, a disorganized product that the two boys shared between them. He had taken the editorials, Philip, leaving Lee with the dregs. No, in this case it was the editorials that dregged.
“Oh lookie here,” one of them said. “Marsha Swop showed up at the awards ceremony in a transparent dress!”
“Very good.”
“And such décolletage!”
“That’s nothing. Seems here that a coalition of fashion models and basketball players has bought a controlling interest in…” (He mentioned a large and well-known fiber jobber located in South Dakota.)
“Lee! Someone was offended in Wyoming! They’re sending a couple of therapists.”
“Hey, here’s an opening for a design manager for NVIDIA multi-modal back office marketing.”
“I had rather be dead.”
“And here, a really big-time vacancy for mapping client custom data conversions. Wonder how many people are doing this kind of shit?”
“My great-grandfather was a mule skinner.”
“Says here that Robin Hart is going to be given more screen time. He’ll be getting…” (The light was weak.) “… $600,000 per episode.”
They moved on, trying to ignore the sound of drums and tribal chants coming from the cars. That was when Lee, somewhat troubled, it seemed, said:
“Maybe we should have paid for that beer.”
“Oh, what a good boy you be! And I suppose we should have paid for the book, too, what? OK, I’ll go back and pay for the stuff. Here, let me have your part — fifteen dollars, let’s say.”
Lee did pay, never realizing until years later that the businesses had closed by that time.
He came home, the linguist, at 6:19 in the morning, pleased to see that although he had received a party invitation and a ticket to a lecture, these had both been declined by Chris Martin’s wife in a note that was as courteous as anything he himself could have composed.
Nine
The next several days passed calmly enough, until on Tuesday, when a great hullabaloo broke out among the back office multi-modal NVIDIA design managers. Going forward to separate the three women, Philip underwent an attitudinal change at the last instant and returned to his cell. The sun was low and he was able to make out his favorite tower scintillating on Brooklyn’s shore. It was not until the following day that Tiffany reported to him with the back story.
Now it all came out, how April’s ex-husband had linked up with a weightlifter from Staten Island who already had two children of his own. Employing a surrogate mother, the two men had contributed a brew of both kinds of sperm, a seminal experience for the woman, who after numerous efforts had finally come out with an eight-pound baby girl who upon first inspection appeared to be normal. And yet only a few months later one of the fathers, called Proteus for the sake of anonymity, had caused himself to be transgendered and immediately filed for divorce. Left alone in the great world, the weightlifter, who by this time had set up a profitable downtown gymnasium, contracted a hasty marriage with a certain esteemed French television philosopher celebrated for his work on Being/No
t Being/Nor, as the translator had entitled his major work. Resorting to the original surrogate, these three now produced four children in as many years, including two future alcoholics, a cretin, and another person, seemingly normal, who has meantime faded from view altogether.
“Yes!” Philip said. “The new normal. But I still don’t see how that led to the brawl.”
“Well, I can’t go into that. It’s kind of a scandal, don’t you see.”
“Ah. What does a scandal look like these days?”
“I just can’t say. Anyway, they’ve got a new restaurant over on Blephy Street. Think we should try it out, you and me?”
In fact, he did pass by that new restaurant on his walk to his apartment, but after a glance at the happy-looking diners seated about the tables, chose not to patronize the place himself. It was high summer in New York, and all the women who wanted to be married but weren’t, or were married but wished they weren’t, had come out of doors to exhibit their wares. At one point, he was affronted by a mixed-race couple holding hands, an appalling vision that caused him to leave the sidewalk and make a conspicuous detour into the road itself. “Come on down to Alabama!” he wanted to shout.
The West was dying. A man might wish to own a boxer dog or even a German shepherd, but no one in right mind could want a product of those two.
“A homogenized world, is that what you want?” (He was talking to himself even as his own building hove into view.) “Idiots. You want diversity, you must first of all keep the races away from each other, fools.”
He was assuaged by the sight of Chris Martin’s beautiful wife waiting for him on the stoop.
“Sir? A man was here who wanted to see you.”
“Not Lee, I hope.”
“From the Internal Revenue, is what he said.”
“Blimey.”
“Wants you to call him, he said.”
“I see. You want to handle this for me? You’re good at this sort of thing and…”
“No, sir. We want to have a baby someday, and I just can’t afford…”
“Can’t afford to go to prison.”
“No, sir.”
“Very well, if that’s going to be your attitude. Good afternoon.”
The sun was still very bright and he was annoyed at the quantity of light pouring in at the window and discoloring his furniture. He had caught a mouse in his trap, and the sunbeams had set up an ethereal expression in that one’s peace-at-last face. It had been his intention to prepare a meatloaf this evening, but then had changed his mind after kneading the raw red meat that once had been some creature’s most prized possession. He preferred the physiology of typewriters and clocks to this. Instead, he ended up with a plate of legumes and milk.
