by Jack Livings
I remember.
And I’d told them this, they’re very thorough, and I say, Hello? and there’s Tyrone Flint on the phone about some cross-border lease agreement that was tied up in legal. And, you know, he called before nine deliberately to miss Stephen. He wanted to dump a message on voice mail. So I say, Ready, and the phone rings, and it’s, Oh, Stephen! I didn’t think you’d— Tyrone Flint at Crutchfield Alliance here!
And the time on the phone is 8:45, so I have sixty seconds, give or take. I have questions, of course. But he won’t shut up. I don’t think it was a recording, but he didn’t let me get a word in edgewise. And he kept calling me Stephen.
Do you think it was really him?
Who knows. They seem to have the ability to— I don’t know. They seem committed to providing good service.
And?
And then it’s 8:46. And everything turns into a furnace. The whole office—like a volcano. The walls are gone. Vanished. The desks flew up, the TVs exploded, the fire ate everything. Everyone was on fire. The black smoke. Everything exploded.
What do you mean exploded?
It—everything. Not just the TVs. I screamed and got under the desk. The floor moved, I could feel the concussion in my chest. My eardrums felt like they were shredding.
But the fire and the—how did you survive?
The fire didn’t come into Stephen’s office.
They protected you.
Apparently what I told them was that I wanted everyone in the office to die except Stephen.
You told them you were afraid he hadn’t died.
Yes.
So they … interpret?
They have ways of figuring out what you really want, Eden said. And then they leave you to it.
* * *
Turk had turned operations over to her staff years earlier, but for me she was front and center, met me right there in the lobby. White-glove service. I don’t recall being surprised to see her there, the only addition to the jeans and button-down shirt she wore every day a blue shawl, an attempt to appear matronly. I’d known her my entire life, of course. I’d assumed she was independently wealthy. We were neighbors, but what can you really know about anybody? Every so often she would come tapping at the service door. Spare some milk, have any sugar? When there was a blackout, I’d check on her if she didn’t check on me and Vik first.
As I emerged from the cryptoporticus, she took my arm and walked me through the marble lobby to her office in the back. The lobby looks the same today as it did then. Standard corporate scenery. Glass, marble, tasteful gray twill sofas that have never hosted a set of buttocks. When I asked Turk why she hadn’t extended the corporate façade all the way out, she explained that it was of particular importance that participants remember they were underground, down with the rats and ancient creeks. Anyway, she said, leaning in to me, do you have any idea what it would cost to waterproof that tunnel?
Good Turk.
Her team constructed a complication for me that put me right back in the same office space Eden had watched erupt in flame. Vik’s office, after all, had been right next to Stephen’s. But I wanted some changes. I wanted to be out there in the bullpen when the flames swept through. I wanted the place to disintegrate around me. Wanted the ceiling to collapse. I wanted to be buried in rubble.
On the appointed day, they sent a car to deliver me to the compound upstate, on the Wallkill River. They layered me in Nomex, full hood, breathing apparatus, forty pounds of shielding, ushered me onto the office floor, where I stood among my husband’s colleagues—professional stuntmen and -women, I now know—variously hammering at their keyboards, or sucking on coffee cups with a foot on the file cabinet, or watching the news, and there was this one guy who had a phone to his ear, nodding, scribbling on a pad, and it was he who got my attention because I wanted to know what he was writing (gibberish, doodling interlocking benzene rings, or had he so committed himself to the role that he had collected research on deals the firm would have been tracking that morning and was jotting from memory so that I, the participant, might in some way benefit from his method approach?). I stood against the back wall in my green EOD suit, peering out through the acrylic visor at the scenery, and there above the windows (Eden was right, what a view!) were the LED clocks for London, Singapore, Tokyo, Frankfurt, Buenos Aires, Shanghai, Milan, New York, and it was 8:42, by my request, and when I said, Ready, into the hands-free, the colons on the LEDs began to flash and I prepared to die. I’d spent a month under the supervision of a psychologist, but when it was showtime I didn’t feel like I was Vik or myself or an all-seeing eyeball. I felt like I was a stranger to us both, someone who’d paid an outrageous sum of money to participate in an outrageous stunt in the name of distraction. I felt crass and dishonest and utterly American.
I had a long four minutes to consider the implications of what I’d undertaken, the fiction I was creating, the familiar sense of life at a remove from life. I had time to consider the presence of Albert Caldwell within me—yes, still there, always there—either directing me toward or away from the truth from his frozen little cave, I couldn’t tell which, I could never know, my existence being a dictatorship of ignorance, and at the mark, the windows erupted and fire stormed through the space, a rolling, rippling flood of plasma, incinerating carpet and paper, carbonizing the ceiling tiles, roaring like river rapids, exerting an unexpected force, a physical force—what had I expected, seaweed lapping at my legs, lambs licking at lilacs, tongues of flame and all that? Certainly not this godlike presence crushing me from all sides, reducing, suffocating, combusting within me. The flaming analysts had all dropped safely into the subspace through trapdoors, and when the ceiling collapsed, my puckering throat sucked at the deoxygenated atmosphere, even though the EOD suit had been reinforced with a carbon-fiber cage so that I was wearing, in essence, a protective refrigerator, and the O2 was flowing normally.
The crushing panic was only my neurons hurtling along ahead of the physical sensation, playing the odds, and as I lay pinned beneath the rubble, panting, stinging sweat searing my lips, the screech of steel girders shearing from their mounts piped into my headset, rebar screaming as it knotted and broke, I recalled my training and opened my eyes so that I might take in the same darkness as Vik, had he been there. Had he been there and had he survived the initial impact. A tiny flame danced around in the little pocket of rubble before my eyes, gobbling up oxygen that, had Vik been trapped there, could have sustained him for just a few seconds more. A bright red combustion thread crawled across a wafer of ceiling tile wedged against my helmet. Soon that light, too, flickered and dimmed and died. The rubble shifted now and then, and I watched and breathed and listened.
As Eden predicted, the complication did nothing to make me feel better. It didn’t do anything except fill me with the desire to do it again. On subsequent runs I refused everyone’s advice and insisted on getting exactly what I wanted. It pleased me to think I was screwing with their system, forcing them to rethink their omniscient attitude. I was really going to put them through the ringer. There weren’t going to be any surprises, oh no, not like Eden’s complication. I knew exactly what I wanted.
I was being, of course, as predictable as a sunset. I paid to do it again. I had insurance money, and the brokerage accounts had rebounded, so why not? Why not blow it all playing with fire? I should have been suspicious; Turk was giving me too much leeway, wasn’t she? Letting me control every aspect of the complication. I was supposed to be getting what I needed, not what I wanted. I said I wanted to be convinced of the existence of reality as it had been explained to me. I had been told that Vik died in Tower One, and I didn’t believe it. Put me in the office so that I might believe, I said. Turk didn’t put up a strenuous argument. The staff psychologist went along, too. Maybe, I thought, it just so happened that what I wanted and what I needed were one and the same.
So I stood again in the EOD suit, waiting to be convinced that my husband had been burned, pulverized,
vaporized. I was cooked and crushed and I still didn’t believe it.
Turk listened to my list of complaints, where the complication had failed to mimic reality, where it had failed metaphorically, why I wanted it louder, hotter, with the smell of smoldering steel. She made notes and passed them along to the designers. I was pleased to be in control of something.
My complication had little to do with what was happening within the firebox, but I couldn’t have possibly comprehended that at the time. All the pre-launch histrionics, all my insistence on maintaining control, asserting my agency: that was the real complication, the site of my transubstantiation. She let me run the fireball complication six times in total. I got friendly with the staff. We made slight modifications. After the third performance I no longer needed the office, the actors, the soundtrack. Just the fire and the collapse. I really thought I was making some progress. On my own terms, as they say. By the end, we were down to bare concrete and a wire frame to support the ceiling, no more vid-screen windows, and Jerome, an ex-chemist who’d worked at ILM before Turk hired him away, casually mentioned that for about a tenth of what I was paying, he could shoot me with a flamethrower and drop some reinforced asbestos tiling from a rig, and it would only take about an hour to set up. I didn’t hear sarcasm, but kindness; I felt encouraged that he understood. He saw that I was narrowing the scope of my research, and that as I gathered more information I was discarding superfluous elements of the set. Reality was collapsing beneath the symbolic. As I moved toward the truth, ornamentation was a distraction. Jerome was an excellent actor.
The firebox was not without its merits. It was there, buried beneath the ceiling, watching the flames eat the world, that I brought myself into focus. There, just for an instant, the paper-doll cutouts (me:me) aligned and my borders felt clear, definitive. For a moment I could believe that Vik had died.
In the end, a complication is nothing more than the practical application of a philosophy that substitutes one accepted reality for another. Suppose you have a computer. You exchange its hard drive for another, identical drive. The inputs processed by the identical drive are no different. Maybe there are slight improvements in processing speed; or maybe it’s a little slower. But nothing you’d really notice. Arguably, data flowing through the new drive undergoes a spiritual alteration, affecting every letter and number you type, every image you save, but are such things visible to the naked eye? And do they even matter, if you’re not looking for them? What if someone switches the hard drive without telling you?
A complication is not an escape, but an adjustment. Not an awakening, but a deeper, clarified slumber. It’s both the well and the bucket. Perhaps you drown or quench your thirst. Nothing changes or you might benefit from the placebo effect. We’re not Scientology, we’re not Freemasons or Figure Sevens. We are simply a conduit.
For a few months Turk and I saw a lot of each other. The thicket of sorrow that made my morning walk from the bedroom to the bathroom a bloody, grievous ordeal parted in places to allow me passage. Food went down without lodging on that shelf in my throat quite as often. I might have indicated to my counselors that I’d been sleeping better.
Around that time, Turk started making noises about getting old, about hoping to wind down the business. She talked about it casually, dropped hints, led me to the lake and waited for me to drink. When I asked to buy in as a partner, I thought it was my own idea. I suggested training with her for several years, and then, if all went well, I’d buy her out entirely when she was ready to pack it in.
You can pad my coffin with the money, she said.
In three years she’ll be one hundred. My contribution to the business has been minimal, mostly operational streamlining, some low-watt whisper campaigns after the ’08 crash to drum up business. Hire good people and get out of their way, that’s my motto. Everything will be fine after I’m gone.
Through our Silicon Valley clients we became beta testers for all the latest virtual gear, and now most of the complications play out while the participant reclines on padded mohair in an aromatic room equipped with surround sound and synchronous temperature controls. Certain complications, of course, require full-body participation, and for those setups we maintain the complex upstate.
The ethos hasn’t changed: Not what you want, but what you need.
My own education in the dungeon was, Turk felt, essential to a complete understanding of her business. To understand what it’s become you have to understand where it started, she said.
These days we don’t get much call for the leather and rubber, but occasionally I open up the cells, pull the sheets off the saltires and stockades, oil the chains. They’re all older clients who’ve been rummaging around in the past, looking for the key to a door that won’t unlock. If, as I’m whipping them, they peer back over the welts rising across their sagging skin (moisturize first or it tears like paper), I can see they’re searching, listening to each lash, mind focused, hoping to catch the ignition of a single dendrite, dim for all those years, because sometimes it only takes the one and, presto, you’ve got it, you’re back, you’re rising off the surface of the earth with a nuke jammed in your crotch, old Slim Pickens run in reverse, out of the carnage of the lived life back into your mom’s bomb bay, and the mouth says, More, More! and within reason, okay, but where else can a person go? How far back into the nothingness do you really want to travel? Yes, I’ll do what I can to help, of course. I’ll create a rhythm with the strokes, an exit through which they can be reborn, deborn, vaporized.
Those souls who still need a stranger’s hand, the presence of a sentient life force in the room, I’ll admit I have a soft spot for them, and I’m the only one who caters to their needs because it makes zero financial sense to keep a domme on staff, and a reasonably priced freelancer—well, you get what you pay for there, mostly NYU and Columbia kids who are working through something, don’t have the stomach for skin contact, and otherwise don’t have the proper practical experience. It’s one client every couple of months. So I get into the gear and sweat a little. Keeps me in touch with our roots. Am I working through something myself? Of course I am.
I’ve accepted that, just as I lived first in my father’s book, I now live in a construction fashioned by Turk, my very own personal complication. I was not graced with this knowledge via a broiling cumulonimbus extending a luminous finger to tap me on the crown of my head. No wizened African American man on the bus turned and spoke to me in metaphors. So how could I realize I am completely enmeshed in a complication, a full-scale operation that has no end, a supreme act of love, the sort of love that makes real the interlocking nature of everything in the universe, the visible, mystical, intellectual, farcical, organic, mechanical? I realized nothing. I realize nothing even now. Yet I have no doubt she set in motion a great mystery that has begun to unravel, and the mystery is part of the complication, just as the complication is itself part of the complication. Cue the music, full-cast soft-shoe to that old favorite, “I Know That You Know That I Know That You Know That I Know That…,” jazz hands, heel spin, scissor, scissor, sliiiideee. I have my delusions, and perhaps I’ve lived strangely, but I’ve lived. My granite soul has cracked and the question inscribed there has crumbled.
13.
Back to 1978. Tanawat Kongkatitum was the grandson of Lazlo’s third employee, Sasithorn, a Thai linguist who, while studying at Columbia, pulled rent teaching at the Brunn Institute. Now his grandson, Tanawat, aka Hiwatt, had himself matriculated Columbia to study chemistry and was occupying one of Turk’s empty bedrooms. Turk didn’t mind the company, and Hiwatt’s father sent rent money via Western Union every month, which Turk, who didn’t need it, turned over to the boy, who didn’t need it, either, since he also had an account at Chemical Bank that magically replenished itself whenever the balance dropped below $10,000. The rent money went primarily to Times Square peep shows.
Turk was ethically opposed to moral advice, and any dead-of-the-night thoughts she might have had abo
ut warning Hiwatt away from Times Square always vaporized in the light of morning. There was no judgment at the breakfast table, where she sat in an ancient terry-cloth bathrobe, crunching on toasted Roman Meal with butter, 1010 WINS droning from the transistor on the windowsill over the sink while rumpled Tanawat compared—not without eloquence—the skills of employees of Show World, Satisfaction Emporium, and Peep-o-Rama, the Harvard-Yale-Princeton of jerk-off joints.
Every few weeks, she traded him a couple of twenties for a lid of Oaxacan Red, a strain he’d introduced to her after securing a hookup his first week on campus. It wasn’t that pot was particularly hard to come by, but since the previous May, when her dealer graduated and loaded up his Fiat for medical school in Ann Arbor, the stuff she’d been able to lay hands on was just a cut above what she could liberate from her own spice rack. She kept the stash in a golden box shaped like a single cell of honeycomb, adorned at the edge with two bees made of onyx and yellow sapphire, a gift from her father on her thirtieth birthday.
Her after-dinner routine was invariable: she cued up some Grand Funk Railroad, propped her feet on the ottoman, and blazed a fat doobie, which was exactly what she was doing the night of the blizzard, the only difference being that Hiwatt, usually engaged by 10:00 p.m. in a masturbatory revel on 43rd Street, had been turned back by the ferocity of the storm and now occupied the sofa opposite her, his own propped-up feet smaller, woolen mirrors of her bare ones. His big toe protruded from a hole in the left sock, and he was wiggling it back and forth mesmerizingly. Turk was watching with interest. There was something heartbreaking about a boy with a hole in his sock, and though she considered herself anything but matronly, she worried about the kid’s well-being. Sure, it was the weed talking, but her heart went out to him, so far from home, in winter, all alone except for live girls doing finger shows.
