by SK Dyment
“So, what’s ‘wall therapy’ all about?”
“A psychoprison term for isolation.”
“Fitting, but not too poetic. I suppose that could mean a long time, looking.”
“It was a punishment they used when someone had done something that angered them. They left them alone to look at the walls.”
“Yeah, and sometimes they were wet-wrapped them, and insulin-shocked, and….”
“Ben, I read it same as you. I just don’t want to think about it all day long.”
“I thought you were thinking about cats and flying squirrels all day long.”
“No, all night. It’s just that, reading the testimonies…. “Well,” she sighs,“ torture is wrong. We should get Olesya a decent lawyer.”
“We don’t have money for a decent lawyer, remember?”
“I always have the way to get the money,” Jackie growls. She starts the grinder again, bringing the conversation to a close.
26.
THE PLACE BEN AND JACKIE have chosen is a large, picturesque gun shop and gallery in a quiet little town along the Hudson. The sublime hill that approaches the town is broken by a scenic cliffside and its drop of two hundred feet. Next to the gun shop is a glass and lens-making factory. A jog over is a storage container company. The roof the gun shop, factory, and storage container company share is a flat piece of pitch over two-thousand-feet long. It is a superb landing spot. All three are surrounded a ten-foot fence—except at the front—and which is in no way scalable, thus denying access to the roof. Next to the storage company is a junkyard; any unexpected wind could set the glider down hard enough inside its gates to usher in terrible injury.
The night is very dark. Clouds have moved across the moon, and the two friends assemble the Squirrel in near silence, their preferred method of respect for each other’s private thoughts. The glider snaps together easily. Every surface has been machined within a hair of their own preplanned specifications. It is a sort of dance, each of them dressed in clothes that are as close-fitting as possible, that allows the cool air, which is steady at five knots, to pass through the first layer of weave, while their sweat vaporizes through the bottom weave, absorbing their anxiety.
Jackie snaps the airspeed indicator next to her right shoulder and puts on the yellow night-vision goggles that she insists improve her vision. Ben, riding shotgun in a sling behind her, insists on infrared to direct the Squirrel.
The dark surface of the gun shop has absorbed more heat than the surrounding surfaces and stands out to him in radiating thermal colours like a candle in the dark. There is less than a mile between the shop and the cliff. Jackie will have to crab into the wind in order to maintain a straight line, and then land the Squirrel as soundlessly as possible on an unknown surface.
Her entry to the landing spot must be within twenty feet of their chosen target, and her wind drift correction must be perfect before the final landing. There will be no opportunity to run a test flight over the area and see if it is suitable. If the gun shop has money inside, there is nothing else Jackie needs to know. She expects to bounce once, and then come to a rolling stop with less than two hundred feet to manoeuvre within.
Her only brakes will be Ben’s running shoes, provided he does not forget or fall out of the glider. She has adapted rudders onto the Squirrel and a simple aerobatic design that is her only defense against crosswinds, downdrafts, updrafts, wind shear, and the possibility of going into a spin. She cannot handle the Squirrel if it should invert.
She cannot foresee any of the usual turbulence caused by building obstruction, and even though Ben claims it is thermally glowing with absorbed solar heat, she cannot imagine the roof itself causing her difficulty as she sets down.
The wind has raised itself to eight knots by the time their craft is ready. Her airfoil angles have been designed with a minimum of camber, and, like a real squirrel, with a dependence on tail drag, so that they can avoid pitching, with an emphasis on stability above speed. The horizontal tail is covered in long phoney fur that Ben has combed and combed so that it responds effortlessly to the wind. It is equipped with a rudder. The two kick off and are airborne over the town. Jackie does not look down at the escarpment below her, only at the little sleeping city she is approaching as her craft is buffeted by winds.
As they move toward the target, Jackie makes a sharp turn to battle a draft blowing her away from their landing. She crabs in at a very slow airspeed, requiring an angle that frightens Ben. “Nose up! Nose up!” he shouts when she finds she is higher than she wants to be. Jackie noses down.
Moving once again in the same direction that the wind is pushing her, she is suddenly much closer to the landing surface than her drop in height had indicated. She lowers one wing, then straightens seconds from impacting with the roof, and not on a ninety-degree angle.
She ups two of her three squirrel flaps in the direction that the wind is pushing her and lowers three on the other side. At the same moment, Ben moves the rudder away from the crosswind, causing a levelling effect as the glider hits the roof. It is still aiming at the corner of the gun shop, bouncing in a diagonal instead of straight on, quite different from the landing they had calculated. Ben drops his feet while Jackie pulls an emergency lever that raises the Squirrel’s tail in the air, breaking wind.
After a few more bounces and a terrifying roll, the thing comes to a stop within inches of the edge of the roof, which is trimmed with foot-high decorative flashing.
“Holy crap!” says Jackie, and Ben exhales a sigh of relief. He moves his legs, pushing the wheeled Squirrel backwards, and when they are safely away from the precipice, they jump out of the beast and snap the assembly into parts.
Together, they move with the sort of efficiency grim fear of capture has put into their limbs.
Ben rappels down the inside wall, against the bricks and inside the fence, and finds the window he wants to enter by. It is not set with an alarm, as no one in their wildest dreams would enter the gun shop of this small town, especially through this particular route. He pops a frame and then opens it by reaching inside. They already secured a blueprint of the heritage building’s layout, while Alaska, Vespa, and Wanda were busy obsessing about Turner developments in New York.
Masked like a Wild West cowboy, Ben walks through the empty halls, looks into the windows of closed rooms, and finds that there is a small shooting range, reinforced for sound, while the rest of the floor is dedicated to museum-type displays of arms.
He finds displays dedicated to firearm manufacturers such as Remington, Winchester, the Springfield rifle carried by Union soldiers during the Civil War, and shrines in devotion to Samuel Colt’s early revolver and the Horace Smith and Daniel B. Wesson pistol. He descends a set of stairs and is suddenly surrounded by displays of contemporary automatic weapons.
He has struck a showroom, although it still has that small-town museum feel, complete with its Buffalo Bill trimmings. Ben hurries down the steps, which creak as heritage buildings will do, and arrives at the first floor.
A large sign is directing him to a basement shooting range, but the first floor is dedicated to only the sale and pawning, and not shooting, of guns.
He opens the tumbler-type lock on the door of an office with a Confederate flag. With twice the speed that Rudy demonstrated to Ben, even in his most agile and adolescent crazes, Ben finds a safe by a large oaken desk and kneels down. Using the putty and explosive compound refined by Rudy, he blows open a seam around the lock mechanism. To his partial surprise, the entire gun shop does not explode in a fireball of gunpowder.
Reaching in with gloved hands, he taps the door open on its hinges and withdraws printed payroll accounts, as well as a stack of money received for transactions throughout the week, each set into deposit envelopes ready to be dropped into the bank the next day.
The remainder is in bills from twenties up, and Ben suspects it h
as to do with the pawn business and not the over-the-counter trade. He bags everything and runs past the pawn area where there is a camera. He draws in a sharp breath as he comes unexpectedly face to face with a life-size poster of an NRA recruiter holding her Colt .45 like it is a jaunty toy. She is looking so intensely peppy that he assumes at first she is a nightwatch employee who is tripping on dangerous drugs. When he realizes it is just a poster behind the window glass of a door, he composes himself, hurrying up the remainder of the creaking stairs.
Ducking past a mesh of camo-netting designed for ambience, he re-emerges through the window and pulls himself back up to the roof.
Looking supernaturally calm, Jackie has completely dismantled the Squirrel and wrapped it with ropes inside a tarp. He helps her lower it quickly onto the lawn. It rests behind trees and hedges. It remains there, waiting silently while they complete their descent.
Ben is the last to come down. Jackie has already charged the engine of a postal van in the front of the building and loaded it with gear when Ben arrives.
Together, they drive the van to the edge of town, where they have parked a ’73 Firebird on a utility road and out of sight. Ben claims he borrowed the Firebird from a friend. Piling the gear inside, they push the responsive little muscle car to a comfortable 150 klicks. Their adrenaline drains now, as the rosy fingers of dawn begin to poke through the horizon.
“How much is in there?”
“I don’t know,” says Ben irritably. “Did I have time to count?”
“Do you think we’re doing the right thing?” asks Jackie. Ethical issues nag at her priorities these days. She worries that the town will not find their postal truck and people will not receive their letters on time. She worries that someone who works at the glass-and-lens shop next door will not be able to park because of police.
“Of course, we are doing the right thing. Didn’t we agree to get Olesya out on bail, even get her a lawyer, and get her out of the joint?”
“Since when do you call it ‘the joint?’ You’ve never been in jail, so since when do you call it ‘the joint?’”
“That’s what everybody calls it,” says Ben.
“I hope you are never in the joint. I feel incredibly guilty already.”
“I am an adult and I made an adult decision,” says Ben.
“Adult? Your face was lit up like a kid. If anything happens to you, it’s all my fault.”
“Nothing will happen. Thank you. And yes, I’d like to avoid that, too. In the American justice system, while I am culturally a European, I am a Black man in their eyes,” says Ben.
“I have asked you to promise that I am responsible if anything goes wrong,” says Jackie.
“Jackie, while I appreciate your political sensitivity, it’s just that kind of self-loathing, white- people awkwardness that really gets me down. I appreciate your awareness, but right now, the reported number of giant squirrels landing on American gun shops is hovering at only one. Can the guilt for God’s sake, and let’s get on with the task,” says Ben.
“Count the money,” she tells him.
“Seventy thousand, more or less,” he tells her.
“That’s all?”
“That’s all? What do you mean, that’s all?”
“I mean, that’s a lot, but if they’re pawning I guess they have to…. What kind of a business was that place running? Loan sharking, what?”
“They had a lot of vintage weapons in there, but it looked like a cross between a museum and a supermarket. The kind of place you would stroll around and load up on sentimental firearms for your loved ones.”
“So, they still do a brisk turnover. So that’s not bad. I thought we would still have to sell our mothers.”
“I don’t have a mother.”
“Okay, neither do I. Sell our motorcycles maybe. Or borrow or whatever other people do. Seventy grand. Do you think we can park this thing back at your friend’s house before they get up to go for work?”
“I’m sure of it,” says Ben. “For one thing, they aren’t my friends. For another thing, it’s been sitting there for weeks.”
Jackie accelerates the old Firebird into high gear.
Back at the studio, Wanda is looking for the man she fell in love with, the man she kept vigil for during his coma, the man she feels guilty about screwing around on while she was cloistered in the World of Shoes. But the place is almost empty, as if an evacuation has occurred.
Many of his most-loved tools are still there, as are Jackie’s welding kit, her jacket, and her things. Forlorn, Wanda begins to cry, feeling this is a sign that Ben has left her for Jackie. She tries to reason with herself. She reminds herself that Jackie is a lesbian who once asked her why anyone would want to sleep with something that looks like a board with a hot-dog nailed to it. Then she thinks of all the time the two of them have been spending together, and she moans, sinking to the floor against a red tool cabinet on little wheels. Wanda wants to kick it with her foot. She wants to knock it to the other end of the workshop, or throw it over on its face. She wants to dump everything inside it on the floor. Ben and Jackie have been very careful not to tell anyone else about their plans. That includes Wanda.
She looks in drawers. They are full of plans for models, animated and not, gliders and metal imaginings that walk. They are wonderful. She could not think of two more upstanding people than her missing friends.
But why is Wanda left here, left out, seated on the floor of a glorified garage?
Who is she besides Ben’s companion, Besides the vigil at his bedside? Where has her purpose gone, after the last spoonful of yogurt has been pushed away?
Alaska is trying to help her sell her writing, trying to push her film and art critiques, what is Ben doing? She moans, mechanically clumsy, an intellectual, a woman with a big brain, a woman with a half-finished Communications degree and no one to communicate with.
She pulls open the bottom drawer, pulls out an envelope and pours the contents across her knees. She stares for a moment, then separates each piece of material and examines it, as if she is an auditor for the government. It is the most incriminating collection of documents she has ever seen. She has never seen it before. Before her is Rudy’s fucked-up adolescence and early twenties, represented in every memento from that time that he ever felt passionate enough to keep.
Clearly, he was a passionate burglar. It is her answer. And it is powerful enough to restore Wanda to her senses, because Rudy, who the newspapers now say is the new CEO of Turner Consolidated, is the key man in her campaign to win money for the Condo Owners at every development Wanda has researched, where there are universal complaints.
Now Wanda has something private, something powerful, something that will put her back in control of events in her life. Wanda is going to bite back hard, and Wanda has something called “threat of disclosure” to attend to.
27.
NATALIA IS WORRIED about the people in her building. They are all trying to sue Turner, and if the legal action is successful, they will destroy any plans to destroy the building and end up winning their legal right to live in a luxury palace that is about to fall down. She wants Rudy to marry her, and she wants him to come back to work before the company gets out of hand.
Camelia came to New York and asked to see her, and when they met at an upscale restaurant for coffees, Camelia pretended to drop a spoon and then ran her hand up Natalia’s leg.
As the day wore into evening, Camelia took her to a dinner club where they sat together watching a production of Hamlet expressed by watercolourists on large flip sheets of paper. It appealed to Camelia’s boardroom sensibilities, but Natalia did not like. Later, she took her to a bar and invited her to dance to a song called “Suck My Kiss.” It embarrassed Natalia, as she was being trained for ballet and she did not know how to move her body to the time of that music. As far she could tell by Camelia’s cues, r
ubbing together was the way to boogie down. Camelia ended up getting very drunk on Manhattans—so drunk that Natalia had to drive her to her hotel.
Since it was an expensive-looking place, she left the people at the desk to walk Camelia up to her room, telling them that she had been drinking bourbon with dry vermouth and cherry bitters, and should be left with a fresh pitcher of water in her room.
Clearly, Camelia could not handle everything Rudy was telling her to do. As far as Natalia could surmise, Camelia was experiencing a breakdown and needed bedrest more than deskwork and communication by long-distance phone.
She writes a short letter telling Rudy to come back to New York and be with her to take proper command of Turner before Camelia collapses. She asks him whether he was ever coming back to take on his responsibilities or if he was going to live in the forest forever. Now that she doesn’t have to drive anybody home, she pours herself a drink, and settles in for a speed-read of Hamlet. It was quite a bit like the watercolourists are performed it, and now she had abstract images to attach to the prose. Her email gongs. As she suspects, Rudy is up on a Saturday night.
Better stop short than fill to the brim.
Over-sharpen the blade, the edge will soon blunt.
Amass a store of gold and jade,
and no one can protect it. Claim wealth and
titles, and disaster will follow.
Retire when the work is done.
This is the way of Heaven.
It is a quote from Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, one of the oldest books in his collection. It isn’t right for him to be quoting it, all by himself in a tree. It is the sort of thing people read to each other in encounter groups, or after yoga, or in bed when they were cozied up to the one they love. How can he know what is going on in New York?
