“What do you think I want?”
“Do you think I went through all of that just so I can come back?”
“No,” he says. “I don’t. But this happens, you know? I was talking to Chuck”—Chuck’s the founder—“and I was telling him about you. He knows about you, Aaron. You know that? That he’s personally been through your files?”
“No.”
“I told him what you said and how you were done, all of that,” Wes says. “But I was telling him about how good you are. I told him about that village. The way you set fires, in general? Dude. Talent. You have talent, is what I told him. Inborn. I told him we needed you for a lot more things.”
“You don’t.”
“We want you to consider a different position.”
I look at this other guy Wes has with him. Something is wrong. Unlike Wes, he looks like a soldier. His face is a rectangle, he’s got no neck (a very small leathery one, but almost none), and he’s got a scar on his forehead. He doesn’t look like a frat-boy, like Wes. He looks more like a gladiator you might run into in a cage underneath the Coliseum. The kind of man who could eat you if you ended up in a life raft together for over ten days.
“Did you bring Norman to romance me?” I ask, because the way this other guy is staring is doing a number on me. My armpit-hair has begun to collect cold droplets of sweat.
“No,” Wes says.
“What?” I say. “What, then?”
“Aaron,” Wes says. “Look. We have four new contracts. Shit you wouldn’t believe. Two in Europe. I don’t know if you’ve been reading anything in the papers lately but ignore it if you have. They’re saying one thing and throwing more money at us at the same time. New president? Doesn’t fucking matter. All the same.” The papers say ICS is in trouble—at least it appears to be. Congress is upset about what they are, what they do, where they’ve been. The Katrina things. Just a little while ago some journalist found out about their submarines. They’ll figure out the field-nukes eventually. Long story short, there’s been some public outrage, it’s true, even though I haven’t been paying much attention and I doubt it will come to anything. People want ICS to exist and don’t want to know it’s there. People prefer it to be private. Besides, none of my problems with ICS have to do with what people think of it. My problems have to do with what you end up thinking once you work for them. I am therefore the embodiment of my own problem.
“Come back. Three days. One job. Eighty-grand. That’s it. Then you can decide again.” He turns both palms up. “It’ll be like restarting the computer.”
I stand up. “Don’t come to my house anymore, okay Wes? Your metaphors suck. Also, I don’t have a computer.” Lanie took it with her.
Wes looks disappointed. He is mercurial and dangerous and can make his face appear to be whatever he wants it to be. He’s a chimera. I’m sure he’ll therefore be successful once he quits, too. He’ll be a lawyer or a businessman, whatever. And I do think he’ll quit one of these days. It will get him. It probably already has. There are basically three types who work at ICS: Meatbrains, Pros, and Whiners. Meatbrains like to blow shit up, kill people now and then, and have a good reason to use steroids. Pros don’t give a shit one way or the other. They’re like robots. They do the work, they get paid, they do more work, they get paid, etcetera. They are likely to be old and have fought in places like Granada. And third, people like me. Whiners. Whiners are the dumbest. We hate ourselves and love it all at the same time. We crack jokes and cry in the woods by ourselves when no one is watching. We’re the ones all the movies are about. The humans. Foolishness. For a while I thought Wes was just a Pro, but looking at this face, this look of disappointment at my prickliness, practiced and convincing and totally natural here in my kitchen, I think to myself no, closet-Whiner. Pros can’t even fake emotions, which is probably to their credit. Pros don’t really understand what emotions are, or what they’re for. To Pros, emotions are like spleens.
“All right,” Wes says finally. “But we’ll be around for a couple of days. Call me if you change your mind.”
He stands up, his friend stands up, and magically, we’re a circle of jackasses standing around a table.
“Should we kiss?” I say.
“Two days,” Wes says. “We’ll be here for two days.”
“Just hangin’ around?” I say. “Not a lot goin’ on?”
“We have business.”
“Right.”
“Where’s Lanie?” Wes asks. He’s not smiling or chipper now.
“Out,” I say.
“Mm.”
“Justin?”
“Out.”
“Mm.”
He nods to himself, looking across the room at the flowers he brought.
“Make sure she gets those,” he says, pointing. “Those are money flowers.”
“Money flowers?”
“It means fantastic.”
He turns and leaves the kitchen like he’s walking out of my office.
I follow them, watching the back of Wes’s black jacket as he takes his slow steps. I look at his black socks. The other guy’s got big gray wool ones. Just what a Pro would wear. Wes slips his shoes on standing up, but the other guy has to sit down to pull on his boots. I find it oddly satisfying, watching this badass mercenary robowarrior dude down there on his ass.
Wes puts his hand on the doorknob. I put my hands in my pockets. The other guy stands up.
“You know what, Aaron?” Wes says.
“What?”
“It’s really, really clean in here.”
A couple of times since she left I’ve gone out by myself to whine in a lonesome, sorrowful manner, and I like how the snow looks now. After a few minutes I find my boots and my coat and lock up and start walking down the street. The sky’s yellow, the flakes are coming down. There’s a dive bar maybe twenty minutes away, but not long into the walk I start thinking I’m hungry, not thirsty, not really interested in sitting in front of a bottle and staring up at a TV screen for an hour, so I go a different way, crunching along down the sidewalk, hands in my pockets. What I would very much like to have is sushi, I don’t know why, as I’m not a sushi person. I’m all turned around because of Wes and his buddy. Eighty-grand is a good year’s salary, not a weekend. Some of the adrenaline is lingering in my stomach. Eighty-grand is a cabin in Wisconsin. Or another year or two of not working if I save, if I’m smart. Shit, man: all of college for Justin. His buddy, I am now starting to worry, was from IIS, the intelligence wing. If that’s so then I might as well shoot myself now. I concentrate on the cabin.
There’s a place called Tamaraki. It might not be called that—it’s called something like that. I’ve been to it twice with Lanie. It’s a little unusual for me to be showing up on my own, it seems, but there’s something to the idea of sitting at that well-lit, clean wooden bar, by myself, with all the chefs cutting up the fish, that grabs me.
Then, during this brief fantasy, I catch myself. I don’t care about sushi. I am experiencing instinctual counterintelligence. I’m outsmarting myself on purpose in order to be unpredictable. It makes me even more angry—it’s so unlike me to go to Tamaraki that it’s what I want to do because no one would think to look for me there, and what’s more, some part of my brain thinks it’s a wise idea to keep the reasons secret from myself. I’m brainwashed.
Inside, I wipe the snow from my shoulders and I can see the warmth of the place melting the flakes at the same time. I become transfixed, watching them. My cheeks go red. It smells clean and salty—there are bright lights, just as I’d hoped, and many colors and many people spread across the big, open dining room. There’s a hum of conversation. I think I hear ancient flutes. A few diners from their meals turn to look at me and I do my best to look like some guy coming in from the snow.
“Can I get you something?” the bartender asks.
“What’s the Japanese beer called, again? The famous one?”
“Sapporo?”
“Yes,” I
say. “That.”
“I’ll get you one,” he says, smiling.
“That would be great of you,” I say, “since you’re the bartender.” But who is it that says such hostile things? Me, nexus of anger.
He doesn’t move.
“Big one or small one?” he asks.
“I don’t understand what that means.”
“We have big bottles and small bottles. There are two sizes.”
“Why?”
“Why?”
“Why.”
“It’s just how they come.”
“How big is big?”
“I think they’re twenty-two ounces.”
“I want one big bottle of Sapporo,” I say.
He has remained chipper through this, to his credit. Bartenders—even bartenders at sushi restaurants—tend to handle my need for confrontation better than most. Assholes, I think. It’s because they’re so used to serving assholes. He nods and turns away.
I look to my right. There’s a woman at the bar by herself, looking at me. She looks like she’s 40, maybe just done with work, judging by her outfit. Quick dinner alone. She lives a long ways from beautiful and somewhere in the suburbs of ugly.
“You remind me,” she says, “exactly,” she says, “of someone I know.”
“I’m sorry,” I say.
I get the feeling she wants to talk to me, no matter what. She is smiling. I’m not good in situations like this, but tonight, I want to talk to people. I truly do. It probably won’t work, but I do. When it comes to strangers, I’m like a golem trying to handle puppies. I have incredible strength in my hands and forearms and tend to accidentally crush their internal organs while trying to pet them. Then I walk around crying with their little bodies in my arms, lamenting the classical ironies. Yet now, it feels as though a better, deeper part of myself is urging me forward. Just talk. Just let words go into their heads and let theirs come into yours, Aaron, it’s simple, just note it. Not all of me is self-destructive. Part of me is trying to save me. Part of me likes me. If you sit in your house all day imagining all the ways you’re not in the right kingdom anymore, maybe, instead of staring at the wall, you should talk to people and go back into the right kingdom? There are such things as gates and underground passageways, aren’t there? Have new routes vanished in my absence? What is the secret word? Or is the central gate still open? I have no idea.
“I have no idea,” I say.
“In terms of sushi?”
She helps me with the menu and suggests a few things to order, and I order, and we talk about all the problems with the CTA and then also discuss clouds. Her name is Katherine or probably Karen. She’s a mother but divorced. She’s a lawyer. She asks me what I do and I tell her security guard instead of International Conflict Solutions Consultant or murderer. We move on and talk about various types of fish you can eat. We discuss salmon for eons. She says she likes coming here because she can smoke and no one seems to give her the stink eye. When she says that the bartender comes by and tells us that all Japanese men like to smoke. Categorically. He says that sometimes there’s a convention in town and the whole place is full of Japanese men eating pounds and pounds of sushi, drinking sake, and smoking. They have to be smoking, even as they slide rolls into their mouths. I look around after he says it. There are maybe a dozen suburban white people in here and no Japanese people at all. When I look back he says, “We usually have at least one.”
I drink quite a lot. This Katarina person then tells me that her husband used to be a big boat-guy, a real boat-captain, and that it turned out the boat was an excuse to cheat on her. He did sincerely love boating, she says, but it was also an excuse. She makes it a point to note the ambiguity, which, in a moment of clarity, I find endearing. She tells me that, in a way, she always knew. She tells me about a dream she had about her husband asking her if it was okay for the boat to sleep with them in the bed. That was one piece of evidence. She tells me about another dream where she was water-skiing behind the boat and it suddenly evacuated its bowels and she water-skied directly into an enormous, floating boat-turd. I eat so much and become so drunk and so full of fish that I myself stop being able to either speak or understand what she’s saying. I’m not sure if she even eats—it seems impossible. She is the kind of person who maybe notices her monopoly on the conversation but keeps talking anyway—not because she talks too much, but because she wants to make sure there’s always a line from one person to the other. Underground passageways. Above-ground? Like if she went mute for a second, both of our brains could and probably would seize up. I can imagine some other moment with her—more intimate, less manic, just the two of us, and actually in a different dimension where I’m not married to Lanie—when I am the one talking and she is the one listening.
About twenty minutes after I’ve paid she says, “Well,” and smiles. “This has been so nice. Aaron, right?”
I nod. I come close to telling her that I’m prone to seeing skeletons when I stare at people too long. I hold back. Obviously, though, I feel safe.
She says, “Can we—would you like to go out some time? For dinner?”
She blushes, rolls her eyes at herself. The way she says it—the way she smiles, maybe—I can see that she is a deeply kind, thoughtful person. I don’t know how I can tell, exactly, but it’s a wonderful vision—she actually is definitively kind. There can be no doubt. Not only that, but I can perceive it. I can see that she is somehow afraid, now, as she looks for the right words, that she will either hurt me or hurt herself by asking a strange man on a date.
I put both hands on the bar. “I think that I should—”
“Yes, no,” she says. “Of course.”
“It’s not that, Karla,” I say. “I’m married.”
“Oh!” she says, honestly surprised. She squints at my hand. “Where’s your ring?”
“It’s being cleaned.”
She laughs at that, like I’m telling her something secret about marriage, but actually, my ring really is at this moment sitting in a jar of hydrochloric acid out in the garage.
“I had a good time, too,” she says. I don’t really get it, but we hug.
On the walk home, Wes’s Suburban drives right by. I dive into some bushes way too late, but Wes keeps driving. After the truck’s gone and has disappeared around the corner, I stand, brush myself off, and give a little salute.
I decide to go to Anger Management the next evening—the address and the time are there on the fridge, in Lanie’s writing. Her last communiqué to me. I spend the whole day on the kitchen. The sink is a silent, quiet culprit (and don’t forget the bacterial hotbed of the drain), and I scrub for so long that by the time I’m done, I’m looking at an entirely new layer of metal. Then I use silver polish on it, then scrub it again. I realize I can still see scratches and so I go to the hardware store, buy a finer grit of steel wool, and go at the whole thing again, this time with more patience. I try to be calm and not press down so hard. More than once I go out to the living room and stand behind the curtains and watch the street through the crack. Today there’s no sign of them. I mark all the times I think about Wes’s offer by drawing vertical lines on the bottom of my cleaning schedule. By two o’clock, I’ve thought about rejoining ICS nine times. Europe. There could be plenty to do in Europe. I could potentially assassinate a real king, which would be like unexpectedly and out-of-nowhere getting the hardest item on your scavenger-hunt list. I imagine the cabin, too, and all the safety there. Not because of weapons. We wouldn’t have a moat. I think of it as simple, but containing nice electronic features. Sort of a hybrid place, sort of techno-pastoral, sort of out there in-between everything. Very fine linens and a permanent fresh scent.
I decide to call Lanie. I decide it will be interesting to do it while I’m sitting on the back porch, naked.
“That’s how you make kids who don’t, like, talk,” she says to me, when we get to the issue of me locking Justin in the closet. Justin is Lanie’s son from an old boyfriend.
I shouldn’t say it like that, though; he’s my stepson. He has been for some time. He has never been too impressed by me, no matter how hard I’ve tried. That’s fine, the kid can do what he wants, he doesn’t have to like me, but it’s frustrating, not getting respect. Especially if you’re like me.
The closet incident is what put Lanie over the edge. She was out with some friends. Justin and I were home. I told him to do his dishes. He kicked the TV screen and busted it and I snapped on him and locked him up with the coats. I left him in there for two hours, until Lanie came home. This kid is nine.
“You can be monstrous.”
“I agree.”
“It scares me. It has nothing to do with whether or not I love you.”
“I’m not a monster,” I say. “I know. I lost it.”
“That was something a monster would do.”
“I know,” I say. I’m shivering. I look down and hope, distractedly, that my penis is not frozen to the chair. I don’t think it is. I lift it, just in case. “I have a problem,” I continue. “It wasn’t the right thing to do. I’m going tonight.”
“To Anger Management?”
“Yes.”
She’s silent for a few seconds, mulling. Finally, she says, “I have to admit, I’m surprised.”
“Things are getting…” I look at the frozen, gray birdbath and realize, in a moment of awful deflation, that the “dream” I had last night was not actually a dream. I can see the hole I dug in the snow. I can see the fresh dirt I tore up. It’s real. I look at my fingernails and see the dirt in them, too. So. Basically, in this dream, it was night, I was in my Barney pajamas, and I went into the backyard and buried a landmine beside the birdbath.
“Things are getting what?”
“Weird.”
“Shouldn’t I feel,” she says, “this big desire to come back when you’re all apologetic and you need me? I mean if I’m going to come back? Shouldn’t my heart be welling up right now?”
“I don’t know, baby. I have no idea what you’re supposed to feel.”
“That would be the difference between me leaving as a wakeup call to you and me leaving, like, leaving.”
The Universe in Miniature in Miniature Page 16
