Bodies Electric

by Colin Harrison

  and they were above me and doing—you can imagine, but there was something about that I sort of liked, to be honest, I know it’s not what women’re supposed to want. I was sore all over, they fucked me pretty good, my ass and my mouth hurt, everything. And two of them did it again while the third guy watched, because he couldn’t get it up again, he was thinking of his wife and all the guys laughed at that, you know? It was sort of sad. And afterward I took a shower and had some more drinks. I thought I was going to cry but I didn’t. The two guys who were cops had to go on duty and Patrick drove me home. He said when would I see him again, and I said I thought that was it, you know. That we had done it and nobody got hurt and that was it. I didn’t want to start something. That I loved my husband. He got a little mad but said he understood. So I thought that was just the end of it, but I was stupid about that. There were these rumors that went around the neighborhood, like how I had sex with six firemen, or like every week I did it with four policemen and everything . . . I guess one of the guys had done some talking—at the fire station all they do is sit around and talk and wash the fire engines. One of them spoke a little Spanish, maybe he talked. Hector knows everything about me, that’s why he’s so jealous. It was the wrong thing to do because I had a baby and because of Hector. But if I wasn’t married? Was it wrong? I don’t know. I didn’t get pregnant, I didn’t get diseases, so I’m not unhappy about it, you know? Of course when Hector heard about it he wanted to beat me. But he was afraid the cops would come mess him up. He wanted to know if it was true, the rumors. I told him I’d never tell. He knows though. He knows me, he knows.”

  Dolores’s words faded out over the roof. It occurred to me that she had a certain courage.

  “I told you about what happened to his store and everything, right?” Dolores continued. Around us, the wind moved through the trees. “That changed him. Things change you . . . you never know when something can happen . . .” Dolores looked out over the roofs. “He’s not like he was, I mean he’s still got a temper and he still can kind of get crazy about something, you know, but also Hector is like, sad now. I used to worry if he was going to jump off a bridge or something. I used to tell him, ‘I can’t take this.’ He used to say that guys like him were fucked from birth to death. Just like his moms and pops and their mothers and fathers before them. I can hear him sayin’ it. See, Hector always wanted to be rich. That’s why I’m glad he doesn’t know where me and Maria are now. I got to go get a divorce lawyer or something.”

  “Do you still love him?”

  Dolores paused. The red lights on the top of the World Trade Center blinked.

  “Course I still love him. But that’s not what we’re talking about.”

  Dolores seemed finished and we sat quietly up on the roof, the wind pushing at us and bringing that odd consciousness one feels when slipping past old boundaries. As a man, I understood Hector’s anxieties about Dolores. One may glimpse the expression on the woman’s face while in the midst of it and know with certainty that she is far, far away from you. I understood now that when Dolores and I had sex she was fucked by and did fuck all her previous men at the same time, like a corridor in the mind that one has traveled many times, even perhaps including the man who’d raped her when she was so young and thrown her panties off the pedestrian deck of the Brooklyn Bridge. Her mind held all of her past. There was no possessing her. As a younger man, I would have been jealous, have despaired over this, been tormented by it, tried to suppress it. But flesh moves on. I think Dolores knew the same thing was true of me, too. She knew of Liz and could have guessed about the others. It’s in the nature of what happens between men and women. So when Dolores and I fell into the darkness, as we did later that night, we did fuck and were fucked by our past lovers as well: Liz, Hector, Samantha, the fireman, the girls of my youth, the boys before Hector. The room and the bed and the sweat were hovering shadows of time and death; I think we both knew enough of life, saw the essential tragedy of it, that we hastened toward the momentary refuge of pleasure. In some couples, the closeness comes afterward, in the embrace that follows the spasm. For us, it was in the spasm itself, my forehead flat and wet upon hers, her tongue thrust into my mouth, sucking it as if to pull it from my head, which would leave a sweet pain later. Spent, we fell away from each other, fell back into ourselves, sweaty, done.

  The next morning, when I arrived at work, my body heavy from sex and lack of sleep, I checked Helen’s in-box and found an intercorporate envelope on her desk. It was the report I had asked Janklow at Big Apple Cable to send me, many days late, so much so that I’d forgotten about it. I untied the string binding the flap and slipped the contents out. There was an obsequious cover letter from him, apologizing about the delay, with a concurrent copy going to the Chairman—he would never see it, I knew—dutifully reprising our conversation in order to document his compliance. Ah, the small posturings our jobs force upon us. The file itself looked disappointingly thin. I sat with it at my desk, knowing quite clearly that I was trespassing upon Hector’s rights as an employee and as a private individual.

  There was no order to the slim sheaf of documents. The first was a backward-running log of comments by Hector’s supervisors, recorded at three-month intervals; clearly this was perfunctory, for the entries were terse and repetitive: “Works good. OTR good. [This I took to mean On-Time Record.] Attitude good.” “Works good. Can calculate dB loss. Splicing is good, trained to do roof dish, understands channel splitter and amplifier good. OTR good, attitude good.” “Works good with other men. Trained coaxial cable panel. Cut hand 5/12—one day out. OTR good, attitude okay.” And so on. Hector, for all of his anger and suffering, was a model employee. In three and a half years, he had missed only four days of work. I continued to flip through the pages, realizing that it was leading nowhere; sheet after sheet indicated Hector’s unswerving dependability to the Corporation, and if I had somehow expected to come upon a useful psychological profile of Hector Salcines, then I was mistaken. After all, he was but one employee, a small man. The Corporation reached into the lives of thousands of men and women like him. Like most executives in large corporations—those with over twenty-five thousand employees, say—I did not know anyone who worked in the lower bowels of the corporate body. While we generally liked to believe ourselves to be compassionate toward these lower workers, the fact that we didn’t actually know any of them meant that when it came time to cut back on dental benefits or the Corporation’s retirement plans or to spin off divisions or close certain operations, it was emotionally painless. It would be wrong to say no one cared, but it would be correct to say that it was expected of you that you would not care too much.

  And as I turned over each page of the file, I couldn’t help but contemplate the thin connection between the Chairman and Hector. Both men knew about each other, if only in the abstract, and it would be safe to say that each was a small part of the other’s consciousness; each bore a relation to the other. You could lay the highest of odds that they would never speak to each other—and yet those odds would be almost as low that Hector and I should ever converse. We had already done so, several times, but as far as Hector was concerned I was more or less indistinguishable from the Chairman; we were the same version of man, only at different moments along the arc of power. Hector could hate me in the way that men without power may rightfully despise those who own them. For Hector, I was the Corporation incarnate; as it had fucked him over with lousy pay and soul-killing labor, it also was stealing his family.

  Meanwhile, as the file indicated, he dutifully and dependably kept putting in his time installing the cables, wiring the city’s homes with conduits of mass culture, and how tiresome it must be, drilling holes through window frames and using the oversized power staple gun to secure the thick cable as it wound around floor molding and door-frames to whatever room it was where people watched television. The men wore light blue uniforms with red pinstripes on the shirt and a name patch over the breast pocket. They drove arou
nd in a Ford Econoline 150 with a ladder chained to the roof rack. A lot of the work was done outside, and in the cold and rain and heat. Hector dealt each day with the domestic realities of the company’s customers—kids, dogs, playrooms, housewives, invalids—and thus must have possessed a great well of information against which to compare his own life. And some days, Dolores had told me, it was hardly worth the trouble because he was paid a fixed amount by the job, not by the hour, and doubtlessly he encountered difficult backyards, where the main cable was unreachable through the customer’s yard, and other times the customer missed the appointment or decided he didn’t want a wall drilled through. And Hector simply drew a line across his carbon-form appointment slip, called the office and got the next appointment, and went there. This is why he was forced to moonlight at the car lot, trying to foist rebuilt wrecks and wheezing clunkers onto the unsuspecting. From what I understood, his nearly fruitless effort would have been worth it if he had Dolores and Maria to return to each day. A man, I knew, would endure all manner of discouragement if he believes that doing so has a purpose. But for Hector Salcines, there was none of this satisfaction. Dolores and Maria were gone. His despair could only build.

  Then, paging to the back of the file, I came upon Hector’s original application for employment, which he had filled out by hand in the same choppy capital letters that had appeared on his notes to me. The form listed him as married. The paper was stamped HIRED in red letters and stapled to it was a copy of his employee information sheet. It looked regular enough, listing his current home address, Dolores’s full name and birth date (3/20/65), and other expectable details—except that Hector had listed himself as the father of two children, not one. For a few seconds I was confused. Two? But there it was: Hector Roberto Salcines, age three; Maria Paloma Salcines, age five months. Three and a half years prior; Maria was a little sister. Was Dolores the mother of both children? I wondered, then thinking yes—each child’s middle name had been the first name of Dolores’s parents.

  I closed the file and sat back, feeling numb, a headache finding its way into my thoughts as outside I heard Morrison charging down the hall. There was another child in this mess, a fact that Dolores had skillfully neglected to tell me. Hector’s insistence upon reclaiming Dolores’s heart changed then for me; there was a secret I didn’t know, something driving Hector, and I felt humiliated and stupid, caught in the great foul wreck of things. Life was never as it seemed. Dolores had lied. Oh, had she lied.

  TWELVE

  MORRISON HAD IT NOW. HE HAD THE DEAL WITH VOLKMANSakura firmly in hand, or rather, clutched in his seven fingers; it was sweetly his, and fuck anybody who might be foolish enough to try to take it away from him. I saw this in his face that next morning when I stopped into his office to remind him about the faxes DiFrancesco had intercepted and about my meeting the following day with the Chairman. But, sitting magisterially in a dark blue suit—almost a navy uniform like the one he had once worn—Morrison watched me with abstracted tolerance, as if I were an ant climbing a piece of string. I knew he was thinking about the piece in the morning’s Wall Street Journal that speculated that the Corporation was considering an international joint venture on an unprecedented scale. The piece named V-S and several other international conglomerates as possible suitors, including the strange new Malaysian group that was slyly buying up all kinds of properties and was rumored to have ten billion in cash. The article went on to suggest that such a match would be problematic at best, given differences in corporate cultures, FCC limitations on international ownership of American media, and so on. What the Corporation really needed, argued the reporter, was a simple cash infusion, such as a new stock offering, which would only anger the current stockholders, who would see their holdings watered down, or a straight cash infusion from an outside investor. Like a lot of business journalism, it was only half-right. But the fact that it was in the paper meant that Morrison had instructed one of the Corporation’s PR flacks to float a message into the journalistic ether.

  “I think we should find it worrisome,” I began, “that Waldhausen’s fax to his mistress conflicts with what he told Samantha . . .” I told him about the Chairman’s presence at the computer meeting. “I can only conclude . . .” I told him that I had called the NewMedia Group people and that they were flying in the Corporation’s new entertainment technology along with a technician so that I could show it to the Chairman. “It seems to me that the expenditure, which will run about a hundred thousand dollars, is worth the chance that . . .”

  Morrison wasn’t listening. I stopped talking. He didn’t notice. So I sat there. There seemed little doubt that I was out of the picture. No one in the negotiating group had wanted to talk to me for days, and this indicated that the negotiations were moving briskly. The secretaries on the floor, who knew enough to know that they weren’t supposed to know anything, were nervous. Except around me. I was the waterboy now and they knew it. I stood up and left.

  In the meantime the information about Dolores’s son ate at me and, except for the moments when I had to speak to any of the others, I stood at my office window and pondered her purposeful silence. She had told me she had been raped as a girl, she had told me the contents of the drawer next to her father’s bed, she had admitted her pleasure at being screwed by three men at the same time. Why hadn’t or why couldn’t she tell me she had a son? I rechecked the file, worried that I had missed something obvious that might indicate that the boy was not her own. But he’d been born after Dolores and Hector had been married, which of course didn’t necessarily prove she was the mother, but he had her father’s name. And there was no previous record of marriage on the employment form. Was the boy living with Hector? Or some relative, Hector’s mother perhaps? I calculated that Hector, Jr., would now be six years old. Was he asking for his mother? Was he asking his father why the family was apart? These were the questions I had inquired of my own father. Dad, how come . . . As a small boy I had stood before my father and asked him why he and my mother no longer lived together. I remember thinking that I would promise to be good if the two of them got back together. My father had looked down at the floor in shame and sad knowledge that I would always be pierced by the dream of family. Hector, no doubt, desired to put the Salcines family back together before that same dream died. I couldn’t fault him for that, not at all, and I wished that my own father had shown Hector’s determination when my mother had left.

  I was not ready, however, to ask Dolores about her son. The question rose in my mouth that evening as she played with Maria, as she folded fresh laundry, as she brushed her hair for bed, tilting her head to one side so that the hair fell straight down in a dark curtain. I wondered how often she thought of her son and the strength it took not to mention him.

  The next day was the day I was to meet with the Chairman again. And this time Maria was coming with me. Under a high blue sky we held hands on the way to the subway as it crossed the Manhattan Bridge above a barge churning down the East River. Dolores, who was going to meet us for lunch at my office, had dressed in a new pink dress and put her hair in pink barrettes. Except for the fact that Maria didn’t look a bit like me, we might well have been father and daughter out on a visit to the Museum of Natural History.

  When we arrived at the Corporation building, I told Frankie the guard that Dolores would be coming up later. Then, in my office, I found Charles Kales, the technician from the NewMedia group, a tall, gentle man with an acne-pitted face. He had the equipment set up when we arrived, a couple of suitcase-sized computers, and one the size of a large trunk, which he had configured with cables and power lines, one color monitor for Maria, and a standard keyboard and small monitor off to the side for him.