The Universe in Miniature in Miniature

by Patrick Somerville

  Could that help him, though? The old Sanderson savvy? One of Tom’s deepest and oldest drives has always been to find ways to make the bad into the good, somehow, that’s how he made the money, he’s sure of it, and he feels he could maybe turn this whole situation into a positive situation if he acts as a kind of Jacques Cousteau of depression in this case, heading into deeper and colder waters with some kind of little robot friend as he looks for all the weird translucent albino creature-emotions with glowlights on their foreheads and spiky orange teeth, which he guesses would represent different kinds of self-hatred. He is 41 years old; since last month, twice-divorced. That’s not that bad. It’s not good, but not that bad. For fifteen years he was a corporate lawyer at a massive Chicago firm, never made partner, probably due to his ridiculous social life, and lost his job two weeks ago. That’s pretty bad. And finally, sometimes at night he dresses up in his best suits and goes out to dinner alone at fancy restaurants, where he gets a good head-start on drinking and looks at his watch as though he’s waiting for someone who’s stood him up. So there’s that. And it’s inexplicable, because it wasn’t always this way, Tom has many likable qualities, he has a good smile, he’s intelligent, he can sometimes laugh at himself, but he doesn’t have a single friend. Not one friend. How did that happen? Somewhere along the way, he supposes. In any case, he knows no one who would send him an amazingly weird telegram.

  Because it is weird. Here. He removes the thin sheet of yellowish paper from the envelope and reads the message’s brief lines:

  MR. SANDERSON. YOUR PRESENCE REQUESTED IN MANCHESTER, LOST ARISTOCRATIC UNCLE HERMAN DEAD STOP. PLEASE CALL 44-20-6547-2117 STOP. SUBSTANTIAL INHERITANCE STOP.

  Tom stands here in the foyer and reads the curious message through a few times. This is silly. Although it does indeed appear to be an English telephone number. That part looks good. What seems kind of suspicious, though, is the Lost Aristocratic Uncle Herman part, since he has no Uncle Herman at all, but then again the message clearly notes that this Herman is a lost uncle, and so Tom probably wouldn’t know about him, aristocratic or not, right? His grandfather on his father’s side had been in the war, he’d spent some time in England, maybe there had been a young Red Cross lass plus some martinis plus an unspoken sexy rendezvous in a dark hospital bed that has somehow led to this.

  He will solve this now and not think about it again, as tonight, like all nights, he is occupied with drinking. He goes to the phone.

  He has to think a minute to remember what he needs to dial to get to England, but when he tries the number on the telegram he gets no answer, and is eventually sent to the voicemail of a blustering lawyer named Grayspool. Tom leaves a message in his most professional, lawyerly voice, cool and casz, which he is glad to find he still has, at least for the time being. He leaves his home number and says he may or may not be available, depending on the time, as there’s a chance he could be out at a nice restaurant, alone, drinking a lot and checking his watch.

  He calls his mother and asks her if she has any secret aristocratic brothers by the name of Herman and she tells him no, not that she knows of.

  “Do you think Dad had any secret brothers named Herman?” he asks. “Or aristocrat brothers? Or the combo?”

  “Hm,” his mother says, pondering. He can imagine her squinting her one eye and cocking her head out there in Scottsdale. “As far as I know, he didn’t. But then again if it says he was a lost—”

  “I’ve already gone through that, Ma.”

  Afterwards, he decides to take a shower—first one in a week. As he scrubs himself he considers how similar this telegram is to all the email scams that stream into the junk box, then considers how much it all comes off as a stupid hoax, not real, the kind of thing he would have torn up and forgotten about within five minutes back when he used to be his whole self. Granted, it’s a strange one, but in the end no doubt just an elaborate form of junk mail, right? Didn’t he just the other day get something in the mail that appeared to have a handwritten extra little hello scribbled on the edge? But upon further inspection it was obviously laser-printed onto the envelope and just a cheap trick to get him to open it up and find the REFINANCE NOW letter inside? He used to deride and shake his head at all the poor fucks out in the universe who got taken in by the rhetorical human noise that comes floating into our lives, through all the channels, in all the mediums, all crafted to take—how could you not see those things for what they were? Right away? It’s like they screamed bullshit. Couldn’t everyone see? But no, they couldn’t, and so many people sent away their money to false charities, signed up for magazines they didn’t want, lost what was theirs because they so needed and so wanted to be special. Special. That was it. When it came down to it, this was the desire that could make virtually anyone believe in anything, wasn’t it? To be told that there is no one else in the whole world quite like you. Uniqueness. People want that for whatever reason. Maybe true, maybe not, but it took a certain kind of permission to get there. Jesus. Jesus. People are goddamned morons.

  But as he dries off, he looks at himself in the mirror, a middle-aged and washed up sod, Tom Sanderson, formerly Tommy, child, and he knows he is exactly the same, there’s no getting around, and it makes him sad, staring at himself, but sad in a very simple way, not sad in the newer, complicated ways—sad that he sees how he wants to be special, too, and how he is just the same as everyone.

  Sometime around midnight, Tom is extraordinarily intoxicated and eating a huge microwaveable corndog when his phone rings and the lawyer, a Mr. Cedric Grayspool, is there at the other end, stumbling and bumbling over his words in what sounds like an upper-crust English basso. “Yes, yes, hello. Mr. Sanderson? Is this a Mr. Tom Sanderson? I say, can you turn down that music please, sir? Hello?” Grayspool is presumably referring to the Electric Light Orchestra Tom’s got rocking on his Krell in the living room; Tom mutters an apology as he jogs past the couch and kills the noise. Impressed with himself for not falling down either to or fro, Tom returns to the kitchen and picks up the cordless and says, “Little party going on here.”

  “Ah.”

  “We’re doing a group glory hole thing.”

  “Yes, of course,” says Grayspool. “I should be the one to apologize, calling you at such a ridiculous hour on a Friday night—your Friday, I should say. It’s just that this is a matter of the utmost importance, and when I heard your message this morning, I thought I’d give it a go. Did you say a glory hole?”

  “There’s not really a glory hole,” says Tom.

  “Ah.”

  “I should apologize for saying that.”

  “No need.”

  “What day did you say it was? Grayspool, is it?”

  Grayspool repeats that it’s a Friday—but it’s Tom’s Friday.

  Tom is pleased to learn that it’s Friday, as this will mean college football awaiting him on the TV when he rolls out of bed tomorrow. Then he thinks about it for a second more, looking down at his half-eaten corndog, and he realizes that it’s already Saturday for the man on the phone, which blows his mind a little.

  “You’re in early,” Tom says. “On a Saturday. What are you thinking?”

  Grayspool guffaws. “No rest for the weary, I suppose.”

  “No rest for the wicked, either, eh Grayspool?” Tom says, and he bites into the corndog, having no idea what he means by the comment. He just likes the sound of the saying. He also likes the sound of this Grayspool—seems like a nice person, definitely not some charlatan calling him from a basement in Mogadishu. Maybe there’s something to this Uncle Herman after all?

  On the table, there is a half-empty package of Boursin cheese, its foil folded out for greater access, and beside it, a small knife. Still chewing, continuing what he was doing before the phone rang, Tom begins to slather more of the cheese onto the corndog’s remaining fried nub, then a little more onto the top of the wooden stick, so he can lick it off as something of a finish line. In recent days he’s discovered that Boursin
cheese can make anything—even the best things—better. He decides to tell Grayspool.

  “I’d imagine it does,” says Grayspool philosophically.

  “It does,” says Tom.

  “If you don’t mind, just to leapfrog to the matter at hand,” says Grayspool. “Your inheritance. As you called our offices I presume you received the telegram we sent?”

  “I did,” says Tom. “I gotta tell you, though, Grayspool, this feels a little like a scam to me. I mean I like you and all, so far I mean, you seem like a nice guy, but…Well, for starters, I have no Uncle Herman. But on top of that I’m sort of desolate here, maybe an easy mark? I mean I’m sitting here at my lowest and this feels a little coincidental? Get me? Like, do you know about the downward spiral thing that’s happening here?”

  “I thought the telegram along with the check and the packet of materials regarding your genome would be sufficient proof.”

  “Packet?” says Tom, stopping himself before going in for the last Boursin lick. “Check? What packet with what check? What’s a genome again?” He is moving toward his pile of mail now, still eating the cheese, phone tucked under his chin. “I’m not sure…”

  “Don’t have it?” Grayspool asks. “Sent October second, received October seventh. From our end it looks as though you signed for it. We have the confirmation, anyhow. Ah, yes. I have your signature up in front of me on the screen. It looks like you signed as Wilford Brimley.”

  “Might have blacked out after or while I signed, Grayspool,” says Tom, not remembering signing for anything as Wilford Brimley. “But I very well could have signed for that package.”

  “Ah. Excellent.”

  “Hm,” Tom says suspiciously, looking down now at the moose-sized pile of mail—along with a few small boxes—in the hallway beside his front door. He’s been a little sloppy with household organizing in the last month or so. He can admit it to himself. Should not have fired the maid. “What’s the date today?” he asks, walking over toward the door. As though that will somehow help him.

  “It’s the eleventh here,” says Grayspool. “Tenth for you.”

  “Hold on.”

  Tom gets down into it for awhile, digging around like a badger, phone now on the ground. There really is a lot of mail in the world if you never get rid of it.

  “Hold it here, Grayspool,” Tom tries to yell toward the phone. “Here we go.” He’s pretty much inside the pile of mail now, and only his bare legs are coming out from the pile. “We have contact.”

  He extracts himself with a backward elbow-crawl, holding onto the package, and examines it once free, absently reaching for the phone again. Once the receiver’s back at his mouth he says, “Yes, this is it. I’m holding England in my hands.”

  “Only a small part of it, I’d imagine.”

  “No need to debate it.”

  “So you’ve got it, then?”

  “Yes, Grayspool,” says Tom. “I’ve got it.”

  So it turns out, if Tom is to believe in all the genetics stuff, which—they say—is hard to refute, when it comes down to it, science being science, he really does have a secret lost uncle named Herman. Relative, at least. He really does, and this isn’t a scam. How exactly he got one and how in particular they’re related is still something of a mystery, but the readout from the genetics report (How did they get Tom’s DNA, by the way? A man on the street snipping a lock of his hair? Where has he left a skin cell?) shows that he and Herman share a Y chromosome, which means that—well, Tom’s not really sure what that means. He tries to remember back to his high school biology class but gives up and eventually goes to the computer. After some time clicking around and reading he finds that the Y gets passed from male to male in a direct line of fidelity, generation to generation, so his father then had this same Y, and his grandfather had this same Y. Herman might be his actual uncle, his father’s unknown (probably?) brother, but Tom realizes it might go back another generation, and that Herman could conceivably be his grandfather’s brother, too. There may be more possibilities, but Tom’s brain hurts. It’s the middle of the night. Tom feels tired and alone, sitting here at his desk. That sadness is lingering again, but Tom’s not sure if it’s this new twist or if it’s just the same old. There is suddenly a very new and very real diagonal line in his family tree that throws a lot of things up into the air. That said, everything’s already up in the air.

  There is little additional information in the packet. According to the letter from Grayspool, Tom is required to show his face in Manchester for a meeting with the executors of the will if he is to find out anything about this mysterious “inheritance.” The check is to cover the cost of travel. The letter is vague and there are no messages from this Herman himself—it implies only that Herman was familiar with Tom’s existence, felt a fondness for the hidden American side of his family due to the “circumstances of its origin” and a love for “Take The ‘A’ Train,” which he enjoyed harmonizing to, and has decided to divide his estate between his two most promising relatives. No mention at all of who the other relative might be, and no mention at all of the extent of the estate.

  Tom stands around in his apartment for a while, looking at the different messes in each room, ashamed that he’s allowed it to come to this. There’s nothing hilarious about this; there’s grimness to it, actually. You can smell the reaper in here. Funny what happens when you find yourself letting go—it’s more incremental than it might seem, as it takes a good number of weeks to slowly allow the knots of the self to come undone, let the strings all hang loose. What are we but these cords and knots? He will clean this place up. He’ll give himself a week to get himself together. And then he’ll go and find out about England.

  He writes a brief email to Grayspool telling him when he plans to travel, then goes and hits the sack.

  Tom doesn’t sleep well. It’s the kind of sleep where you think you’re not asleep, but you look over at the clock once in awhile and you realize you must have been asleep, as though you’ve been dreaming a very long dream, in real-time, of yourself lying in your own bed, not sleeping. So it doesn’t matter if he’s awake or not awake—either way, he’s stuck thinking through the major moments in the long line of his life, going over, one by one, what he’s always thought to be the bigger turning points, trying to figure out which is the most problematic, which altered the trajectory in the most damaging way. Because the long-term downward spiral is incremental as well, isn’t it? This is just a locality on the same ongoing corkscrew? It would help to have a sense of what a good trajectory might have been, all things considered. It’s a fruitful thought, actually—Tom’s surprised to find he’s never spent much time thinking about that question, thinking about what the right way and the right line might be. Maybe it’s not the turning points at all? Maybe some other category—like the real question isn’t which way the line of life goes but rather what color the line has been all along, or what its thickness has been, some other quality that it’s very easy to ignore because you’re not thinking about it in the right way. For example, he was once in love, but long before Sherry, even before Marianne, and in a very different way. A girl he met in law school named Christine, soft-spoken and sweet, born and raised in Wyoming, kind to the point where it makes Tom almost want to cry, recalling just her general attitude, what she’d be like when you saw her on campus in passing and ended up just walking a few hundred feet together before you both split and went your separate ways. Where did she get that kindness? Did she know how much it mattered? And wherever she was now, could she possibly imagine that Tom, her old boyfriend who she had certainly not loved, not like Tom loved her, because he hadn’t actually known, and only figured it out years later, upon reflection—and besides, he didn’t even know that he did and never said a thing one way or the other—could be lying in his bed, asleep and awake at the same time, recalling the particulars of how her voice used to go up and down when she would smile and discuss a quality in this or that professor she admired or take note
of a little nook in one of the libraries that she considered her own personal hideout? She was not an effusive idiot, though—that’s probably what Tom had first thought about her, although he can’t now remember. She was smart and she was a skeptic but she’d found a way to fold happiness and kindness into that equation as well. What a wonderful girl she’d been.

  Or what about the day when he had just turned thirty and the man attacked him on the street? A homeless man. Middle of the day, right on the sidewalk in the Loop, people all around, watching like it was a spectator sport. The man clearly saw something in Tom—the way he walked, the way he dressed, the way his face spelled out his privileged life or his success, spelled out just his position in the grand scheme of American life—and came after him when Tom said, with no eye contact, “Nope,” in his response to the request for a little spare change. Tom knew and Tom could remember how much disdain had dribbled from each of the letters in the word “Nope,” how the slime of it sort of hung off the lower points of the N and a gelatinous, glistening gob of it hung from the bottom of the p like industrial waste. Had he done that on purpose? Not really—it was just there, just in him. On purpose is a really hard thing to pin down. He usually disguised his distaste when the homeless talked to him but on this day he was feeling good and simply chose not to disguise it. It’s not like he said, “I think it’s your own fault that you’re who you are and I’m who I am and I take credit for my success and you should take credit for your failures, and if you were any kind of man you would figure out a way to put the pieces together, get a job, get an education, be a real member of society instead of being what you are, being a suck on the system, being lazy, being a victim, I don’t give a fuck about your clinical depression, I’m not sure such things are real at all,” but in a way he had said it, just in the nope, and the man had come after him. He’d pushed him in the back and Tom had turned and looked at him in shock. The man had come at him again and Tom had punched him in the stomach and he’d collapsed onto the ground, holding his gut. He was frail. He was very old, Tom saw. Way too old to gut-punch. And Tom saw, too, the looks of the people around him and realized he was the villain. At least that’s what everybody thought.