“Then, we have to swap out packs on the drive spindles.” He let me have another look into the locked bakery of magnetic layer cakes. “Each of these contains a whole shelf full of your pitiful excuse for a library. A group of programs or a set of data files. ‘The Clients.’ A hundred thousand names, but it’s easy to fall into the singular. ‘Put that Client up on spindle three.’ Almost as ridiculous as using ‘Washington’ or ‘Moscow’ to stand for a quarter billion.”
Nor was metonymy his only professional figure of speech. He called up files, spoke to the console, shook hands with peripherals, woke or retired a system partition. Programs ran and processors crunched. Names were fields and fields made up records and records were data and data came in streams, packets, or blocks. An unassuming word like “overlay” served as noun, verb, adjective, adverb, and probably preposition on a good day. The whole sport made Shakespeare’s functional shifts seem like small-time word processing. Up time and down time, hot, warm, and cold boots, and the apocalyptic-sounding full system crash.
“If the runner stumbles or falls … then the fun starts. We’re just supposed to check the hardware and resubmit the aborted job. If it aborts again, and we’re sure it’s not a paper jam or the wrong pack or something equally imbecilic, we’re supposed to dial the field service men—the Green Berets. Big salaries, twenty-four-hour beepers. But those guys are obnoxious, and in hexadecimal to boot. So Dr. Ressler and I have gone in for a little underground education in differential diagnosis.
“Every job we submit, every command we issue, is written into a console log. Fortunately, nobody reads them. They hang in the listings library, gathering digital dust. If anybody took half a look at some of the operations we’ve performed to keep things running at night, we’d be in a heap of hot floppies.” He shrugged. “I work. I follow the list, the flowchart. The key to the entire process, from beginning to end, even the exception handling is specifiable by exact rules. One need only know the context. Not unlike choreography, I suppose. ‘Two pas-de-bourrées, a ball-change.’ But the bit of chenille fluff in the chorus never gets to see what all that spinning is all about. It’ll be Robo City in here in another few years,” he said, with serve-them-right enthusiasm at the prospect. “The only thing that’s prevented their introduction until now is the superstition that humans are still the only thing capable of surviving the system crash. Also, the Doctor and I are still cheaper, for the time being.”
We sat in front of the console and stared at the equipment, now completely changed. The phone rang, disturbing the empty hiss. I thought: Here is one of the few places where a phone call late at night doesn’t automatically mean someone has died. Todd answered. “That was Dr. Ressler. ‘Bookkeeper’ is unique. And so, my friend, is your face.” I smiled, already skilled at letting his moments of confrontatory zeal fall away without crisis. “What do I do for a living? I’m not sure the question has an answer anymore. Everyone, no matter what he does, is kept in the dark about the clients.”
This was the moment of expansiveness that brought me compulsively to Manhattan On-Line to sit with this stranger after my own shift was over. “Do you know Ben Shahn’s great answer to that question? I take a guilty pleasure in the man’s paintings, knowing his whole pastel, representational aesthetic has been on the outs for a decade. But his essays need no excuse. He tells a story of an itinerant wanderer traveling over country roads in thirteenth-century France who comes across a man exhaustedly pushing a wheelbarrow full of rubble. He asks what the man is doing. ‘God only knows. I push these damn stones around from sunup to sundown, and in return, they pay me barely enough to keep a roof over my head.’
“Farther down the road, the traveler meets another man, just as exhausted, pushing another filled barrow. In reply to the same question, the second man says, ‘I was out of work for a long time. My wife and children were starving. Now I have this. It’s killing, but I’m grateful for it all the same.’
“Just before nightfall, the traveler meets a third exploited stonehauler. When asked what he is doing, the fellow replies, ‘I’m building Chartres Cathedral’.”
HOME FIRES
We weren’t involved. I simply wanted to spend my free minutes in Franklin’s company. Sitting with him while he worked felt like repatriation. Franklin, remarkably, found nothing unusual in my overnight fixation with this place. He treated both my forwardness and reserve with the same easy touch. His intimacy could go on at arm’s length forever.
I felt so awake, so ready to resurrect old steps and learn new ones I’d given up on. Remorse only came when I felt how blameless I was feeling. Guilt worked its way in, however. Romance at thirty is shot through with ambivalence. I was too old to think that my liberating happiness with Todd justified putting Keithy to the torch. The pleasure I felt in Frank’s company was already compromised, and I could calculate no future payoff worth the surcharge needed to reach it. But bad conscience is one of those parasites that makes its host hungrier.
The evenings when I took the detour home produced a chunk of hours I had to account for. Tuckwell’s and my relationship always pretended to place no bind on one another. But even Keith’s cultivated obliviousness soon gave in to curiosity. For a while I got by on transparent excuses. The irregularity of my work covered somewhat, made Keith lose track of when I would ordinarily have come home.
Hard to confess anything when I had nothing yet to confess. I had no hope of explaining to Keith a fascination I didn’t understand myself. Keeping quiet, on the other hand, was evasion, and I never could skulk for long. Crawling into bed one night after my embarrassingly late return, Keith and I outdoing the other in liberal tolerance, I resolved to come clean, although I still didn’t know what that meant. Copying Todd’s blunt trust in words, I stoked up to make a clean break. “I’ve made a few friends.” I thought once I got going, I could imitate Frank’s easy jig. But after those six quavers, I softened the contour of the line. “Eccentrics,” I added, choosing the perfect word to render them harmless. It suddenly seemed self-indulgent to concern Tuckwell with exaggeration.
My time with Keith, if increasingly infringed on, remained unchanged in all respects but the important one. We still lazed together in the front room with the panoramic vista over the river. We still watched the nightly news together. We still needled one another with need. One early September evening, out of remorse and nostalgic love, I decided to stay home. Tuckwell lay spread across the floor with a portfolio, testing out jingles on me while I did my next day’s homework. Keith was building a truly bizarre strategy for selling microwave gourmet meals, using an ad I had discovered in the September 18, 1939, issue of Time: “Hitler Threatens Europe—but Betty Havens’s Husband’s Boss Is Coming to Dinner and That’s What Really Counts.” I had shown it to him to make him laugh, something I’d done precious little of lately. But he’d latched onto it as the perfect piece of camp with which to run a retro sales pitch. “Sick sells,” he lay on his back repeating. “Not a pretty fact. But then, persuasion is not a pretty business.”
I wrapped up a few loose questions. I’d chosen, for tomorrow’s event, the September 3 in that year when there was no September 3: in 1752, when Britain and colonies at last adopted the Gregorian calendar. By official decree, September 3 became September 14—correcting the eleven-day disparity that had accumulated between man-made time and the seasons. As had happened elsewhere in Europe as days disappeared into nothing, the reform was met by rioting. People’s already too-short lives were cheated of yet another eleven days: vanished anniversaries, lost evenings at the pub, almost a dozen nights of potential pleasure. Paid by the hour but debited by the month, tenants paid thirty days of rent on nineteen.
The nightly news was over, the set turned off, but the evening’s sound track—Bartok’s Piano Music for Children—still hobbled over fourths and minor seconds, relating strange Hungarian folktales. I closed my eyes: the music was about a forest deep in Eastern Europe where night had fallen for several hundred years. I open
ed them again to find Tuckwell still sprawled across the throw rug, happily destroying the evening paper. I loved the man, stayed with him because, for a manic narcissist with a fierce death wish, Keith was relatively sedate and regular in habits.
Tuckwell stood, stretched, groaned like a compromised banshee, and went and pestered the human being nearest at hand. He came over to the makeshift typing table where I worked, lifted the hair off the nape of my neck, and bit the revealed skin. Choosing not to notice how wrong the moment had become, he asked, “’Sappening?”
I pulled the first card off of the unanswered pile. Not daring to look at him, I pitched my voice into soprano and inhaled. “‘Why did the Russians shoot down that airliner? Hundreds of innocent people killed. Will somebody please explain this to me?’ Signed, ‘A.N., 9/14.’” Facing the far wall, I monotoned, “What you got on Flight 007 today, Chet?”
“Not a whole hell of a goddamn lot, David,” Tuckwell replied, but returned to the papers to see what he could dig up. I drafted answers in my head, one filled with accounts of warning shots and tape transcripts, one beginning “Discrepancies in what the interceptor saw and what the liner did persist,” still another urging the questioner to read everything printed on the incident. Not one reply satisfied.
I was cut by a sharp grief, not for the 269 latest casualties in the perpetual war, but for A.N., who didn’t have a chance in creation of getting a simple explanation for what was going on. It was a reasonable question, but as with the tacit prices on Upper East Side menus, if you had to ask, you couldn’t afford the answer. The horrible full-color spreads, the antiseptic seal torn off of the usually restrained AP reports, the resulting global knee-jerk calling for a full accounting on the part of anonymous trigger-pullers everywhere: and then the veil of routine slamming back, once more condemning A.N. to the bewilderment of local life, while Here and Now squidded off in a cloud of ink until the next liner was downed.
Sadness doesn’t capture it. I need a meatier, nineteenth-century word. Sorrow; the sorrow of press secretaries failing to explain away nations. When I looked at Tuckwell, news scrap over his lap, my sorrow grew. For the two of us—our last, ordinary evening at home. I whispered, “What in the hell am I supposed to tell this guy?” Alarming Keith more than I had in all our years of living together, I burst out in violent crying. I let Keith comfort me, talk me into giving up on answering, calling it a day. He led me into our bedroom, where he pried the typed card out of my hand and laid it to rest on the night table. It still sat there unanswered days later, on the equinox. The first day of autumn in anyone’s calendar.
VIII
AFTER THE FACTS
The dead airplane passengers were still on the night table on September 23. Relations with Keith hadn’t steadied in the interim. There were light moments—hours as free as any we’d had. We laid into the old conversational cadences, careful to avoid irritation. But chain jumped off sprocket at the least torque. Something caused one of us to miss the pickup, and we’d be off, attacking one another in the highly civilized diction of private symbols that had caused the hurt in the first place.
Tuckwell came to bed on the first night of autumn, excited by the growing cold. I could feel in the choreography of muscle contractions his hope for a reconciling predoze fondle. He maneuvered tentatively, afraid to ask outright for a touch I might deny him. How dare he protect himself from me, blame me for refusing? Slowly enough to be above reproach, I removed by millimeters to my side of the bed. Sheer perversity; how far away did I need to be before he asked me to return?
We lay in bed, outraged in every idiom short of English. Neither of us could break the escalation of accusal. Keith flicked on the reading light and directed the spot to his side. Even politeness was a threat—the effort he took not to disturb me. He reached out for his night reading but grabbed the question about Flight 007. He slammed the card down on the nightstand. “Can we get rid of this shit, please?” he whispered, so as not to wake anyone. “I’m sick of looking at it.” He went to the kitchen to fish the day’s newspapers from the trash. He returned, crumpled a couple sheets for my benefit, and read: “Reasonable prospect of Navy finding black box. Russians are sweeping for it in force. Seen dragging something out of the waters. Widespread agreement that the 747 had been over Kamchatka for some time.”
I grabbed the gap widening in my face and pinched it shut, pushed it into my pillow. I turned my face sideways, an efficient crawl-swimmer coming up for air. “All right, Keith. OK.”
“OK what?” Nonnatives would have heard no rage.
“OK, I’ll fabricate some sort of centrist smear for this person. Face the Nation. Whatever you want.”
“What I want is not the point. Who said anything about smear? Why doesn’t this person do her own work? What does she want you to do, paraphrase the same pap she can read herself? Cliff Note the mound of crap it’s already buried in?” Typical Tuckwell: whenever he attacked me, he worked around until it seemed his one wish was to protect me from assault.
“Just the opposite,” I addressed the ceiling. “She wants me to shovel her out.” Covered in cotton and clichés, I molded myself into the shape of the offending shepherd’s crook, facing the wall. As soon as he was out of my field of view, Keith seemed the most decent human being alive, susceptible to the best of excesses. I felt him get back into bed and switch off the light. After a moment, unasked-for, denying that the flareup had happened, he molded his body along mine. We lay flush, curled, the two fastened alloys in a thermostat coil. I neither shook Tuckwell off nor returned his pressure. If I didn’t move, I might be able to drift off despite myself. But not moving only aggravated the drag holding me against the bed.
We were both in absurd occupations; that was the problem. But pressed, I couldn’t place the standard blame on the office for ruining my private life. I had only myself to fault. I repeated silently, like a Baltimore catechism—Q: Who made you? A: God made me. Q: Why did God make you? A: To know, love, and serve Him in this life and be happy with Him in the next—the one question in recent weeks I’d managed to answer definitively: “Q: How do you get moonlight into a chamber?”
The next day, behind the Reference Desk, I typed a long, inconclusive response to Flight 007. My mind was not on the victims or the absurd geopolitics, but on the man I was downing with my own absurdity. Every time I concluded that Tuckwell and I were genuinely ill-fitted—that we’d forced ourselves together for years because we were the age when more exploration is no longer cost-efficient—I recoiled, knew I was rationalizing my own new side romance.
I could no longer tell failed imagination from realism. The day I admitted that life with Tuckwell had lost itself to familiarity, I also felt an urge to run for the crosstown and gate-crash Tuckwell’s familiar office just to see him. His most irritating habit, the asymmetry of his sternum, his stupidest mannerism, the white spots under his fingernails, had been fashioned exclusively for me, and I had failed to value them.
I came home that evening intent on redeeming myself. Like a literalist from a liturgy, or coed from a cathartic feature film: nothing more important, easier than being a little kinder. Keith must have felt something similar, for we collided at the door and kissed without a crackle of static. He let me fondle him, then slipped his arm around me. He brought me to the panorama plate glass running the length of the living room. We looked down on the same life-threatening street I had just threaded. The view from here had nothing to do with the one at eye level. “Q:,” he said, shaking me affectionately.
“Shoot.” We laughed off the bad word choice.
“Is the world getting any better? K.T., 9/23.” Last night’s fight was just passing madness, the end of a fiscal quarter.
“Every day in every way,” I said, silently struck by how little the billion-dollar self-help industry had changed in the half century since Coué.
“The eradication of smallpox and polio,” Tuckwell offered.
“Large-scale dismantling of the old colonial sy
stem,” I added. “Fiberoptics. Wide-body transport.”
“The New York Mets. Frisbees.” A sad joke, but our own. Keith dragged me to the kitchen in his wake. The place was a riot of dissolute Baggies and lidless jars. He was preparing my favorite of his private recipes, Neutron Chili. Beating me to the peace offering. We worked together; I spiced and stirred while he sliced and carried on a running burlesque. “I was a very ethnic child. Born into a mixed neighborhood. Democrats and Republicans …”. We had both hit upon the same solution: all-out effort to save the endangered ordinary routine by doing nothing.
“Perhaps I shouldn’t reveal this to you,” he said, thrashing in a cabinet above the stove, “seeing as how you’re in a perfect position to abuse the information. But the key to really profound chili is this.” He held aloft a nickel bag of cumin that had somehow evaded the Board of Health. He made for the stove, playfully chucking me out of the way.
“Keithy, stop. Wait a minute. Listen. I already put in two tablespoons of …”
“Geet otter here. What do you know from chili?” He blithely measured what he called a “guesstimate” into the stew.
“Tuckwell!” Shrill enough to draw him up short, but too far. I tripped a surprise rage in myself and could not back down. “Who do you think …? What right do you …?” I froze in his gaze: he had every right. I began again, unnerved. “Don’t you think you ought to at least taste before you interfere?” Ludicrous; it was his recipe.
Still clutching the cumin, Tuckwell tried to salvage the moment. “Two people who love each other,” he began mock-pompously, “who sincerely want to bridge the solitude surrounding each one of us ought to display an unwavering, unqualified trust for everything the other takes into mind to do. A woman, for instance, should be able to sacrifice a meal to her man’s screwing about with the same abandon that Abraham exhibited in prepping the pot for Isaac, even in the knowledge that no ram will be waiting in the bushes when he hacks things up. You, for instance, should be able to watch me take this entire bag …”. He started off comically, but quickly fatigued: if he joked me out of this, the next repair would be even more strained. I apologized, told him to do as he saw fit, and left. I looked back as I shut the front door to see Tuckwell spicing the meal for one.
The Gold Bug Variations Page 18
