Downtown Owl

by Chuck Klosterman

  Little Stevie Horse ’n’ Phone was her friend. She considered him cute, enthusiastic, idiotic, and sometimes annoying. He chewed his nails and talked about cryptozoology. “Loch Ness is twenty-three miles long and eight hundred and thirteen feet deep,” he told her on multiple evenings. “The water is exceptionally cold. The loch also serves as the storage reservoir for a hydroelectric scheme, the first of its kind in Scotland. Its turbines originally provided power for a nearby mill, but now electricity is generated and supplied to the national grid.” Little Stevie was the only person in North Dakota who could lecture about the Loch Ness monster for over an hour without using the word monster. “I’ve seen the Robert Rhines underwater photographs, and I think any rational person would have to conclude that he’s probably captured the image of some kind of warm-blooded plesiosaur,” he would say. “But then again, who knows for certain? Rhines was a credible aquatic investigator, but he was also a U.S. patent attorney. Maybe he had an agenda. I’ve seen copies of the CIA documents where Special Ops guys speculate that the creature is the ghost of a dinosaur—perhaps some kind of astral projection, or something along those lines—but that doesn’t strike me as realistic.” Little Stevie Horse ’n’ Phone had no idea that he was abnormal. Such a notion did not strike him as realistic.

  B.K. (aka Brother Killer) was her friend. Brother Killer liked to talk about Vance Druid. All the boys did this to varying degrees, but B.K. did it almost exclusively. “Vance and I played football together,” he said. “I was on the field when he made That Play. I threw a block for him. It was a key block. Key. You couldn’t see it when they showed it on TV, because my block was out of the frame. The cameraman was an amateur. But I was part of That Play. I was. I was totally part of it. Vance is such a cool guy. You’d never even know he made That Play unless somebody else brought it up. He was always like that. About everything. He never cares about what things are supposed to mean. One time we were all over at the White Indian, and some jackass—this guy named Kent Jones—decides he wants to challenge Vance to a drinking contest. Kent’s acting like he’s in ninth grade or something. It’s embarrassing. But Kent keeps talking about this and talking about this and talking about this, and finally Vance says, ‘Okay, fine. Let’s have the goddamn contest.’ So Kent pulls out two twenty-dollar bills and orders twenty shots of Jäger and sets them up in two rows of ten, and the two guys sit across from each other. The rule is that each man will drink one shot every six minutes. If they’re both still alive after an hour, they start over with four shots of Lord Calvert. These are standard rules. So everybody gathers around the table, and somebody says, ‘Go.’ Kent drinks his shot down and Vance drinks his shot down. And then Vance walks away. Kent says, ‘Where are you going?’ And Vance says, ‘I guess you win. Thanks for the Jäger.’ And then Vance sits back down at the bar, orders a Schmidt, and goes back to watching TV. So Kent gets stuck with eighteen shots of Jägermeister, and he just has to sit there and throw back shots all night like a lonely fucking asshole. Brilliant. See what I mean? Vance is such a cool guy. I always love telling that story. Always. It’s a classic.”

  “Valentine was right,” Julia said to Naomi, boozy from vodka and befriended by all. “I like it here.”

  Naomi was lying on her back on the other side of the booth. She was watching the ceiling fan rotate. The ceiling fan wasn’t on. The only part of Naomi’s body still visible to Julia was her left hand, still wrapped around a drink that remained on the table. Sometimes she would hear Naomi exhale; blue smoke would rise from the void. “You like it here,” she repeated. “I’m glad you like it here, Jules.”

  “This is an easy place to live,” Julia said. “Everybody is so nice. Everybody is different, but everybody is the same.”

  “I’m different,” spoke the void. “I’m not the same. Who the fuck are you to say that?”

  “That wasn’t an insult.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. I love you.” Her hand disappeared from the edge of the table. The cocktail remained.

  “I love you, too,” said Julia. “We’re good friends. I love my good friends.”

  “Fuckin’ A.”

  “Maybe I’ll try to coach volleyball next year.”

  “What?”

  “Volleyball. How hard can it be?”

  “What are you talking about? What did you say?”

  “Never mind,” said Julia.

  “I love you, Jules,” said Naomi. “We’re good friends. Jules. Remember Jules? We’re the good friends inside this bar.”

  “Yeah, I remember,” said Jules. “I remember.”

  JANUARY 11, 1984

  (Horace)

  When that afternoon’s café conversation started at 3:05, the principal topic of debate had been Vice President George Bush—specifically, what he had done (or not done) while in charge of the CIA. However, the discourse slowly evolved into a different question: What was the worst thing any person could do?

  The answer—for reasons that were supposed to be self-evident—was operating as a spy. This was what Marvin Windows insisted. Marvin hated deception.

  “There should be no trial for anyone accused of treason,” he said. “There should be no judge. There should be no jury. Just find the man and kill the man. Point a pistol at the traitor’s head and squeeze the trigger until the hammer goes click.”

  “But what if the man is not a spy?” asked Edgar.

  “Doesn’t matter,” said Marvin. “Maybe he’s guilty, maybe he isn’t. Sometimes we’re right, sometimes we’re wrong. Justice isn’t perfect. But if the penalty for spying was always execution, regardless of proof…well, you wouldn’t have to worry about who was—and who wasn’t—a spy. The problem would disappear overnight.”

  “That’s asinine,” said Gary Mauch. “You can’t shoot people on suspicion. Just think what would happen to our own men over in Moscow and East Berlin and down in Cuba. If we started randomly murdering everyone we thought was a Soviet spy, they’d do the same to our spies.”

  “They should,” said Marvin. “The Russians should freely execute any and every spy they find. That is completely within their rights.”

  “You’re losing your mind,” said Gary. “You’re talking like a drunken sow.”

  “No,” said Marvin. “I don’t care what country you’re from or what you claim to believe: There is nothing worse than a man who pretends to be someone he is not. There is nothing more pathetic. What kind of person builds his life around lying? What kind of person builds trust, solely with the intention of betraying those who trust him most? The desires that motivate a spy are worse than whatever objective he thinks he’s fighting for. It’s the coward’s way. Nothing could be less honorable. It is almost like they want to die. They’re asking for it. They know they’re horseshit.”

  Horace swallowed a mouthful of wet caffeine and closed his eyes. It was not his practice to disagree with this man; Marvin Windows understood things that he did not. Only Edgar was stupid enough to regularly question his principles. But this time Marvin was dead wrong. Horace could not allow this conjecture to pass without a confrontation.

  “That’s not really so,” said Horace. “I understand what you’re saying, but that’s not how it is. Take the case of Juan Pujol, for example. Pujol is a decent fella who grows up in Spain during the 1930s, hating the Nazis. He hates the Russians, too. He hates fascists. He wants to be a spy for Britain, but the snooty Brits turn him away. So—in order to become a spy for England—he becomes a spy for Germany. He becomes part of the Nazis’ war machine, and he does a lot of quality work for them. He creates something like twenty-seven separate identities. Twenty-seven! But once he’s a Nazi insider, he starts delivering misinformation for the Allies. He tells the Nazis that Allied forces are planning to invade the north of France, which prompts them to withhold troops from the beach at Normandy. We all know what happened there. Juan Pujol probably won us the European theater. So here’s a man who nearly gets knighted by the British, but he also gets the Iron Cr
oss from Germany. And he deserved both honors. You think they should have killed this guy for being exceptionally good at his job? That’s not right.”

  Two days before, Horace had finished a 452-page book called Code Name Garbo: The Juan Pujol Story.

  “To hell with that. They should have rekilled him twenty-seven times,” said Marvin. “You talk as if this Spaniard was some kind of hero. All he did was lie to people. That was his whole vocation. He could have just as well moved to California to be an actor and drink orange juice. That’s all a spy is: an actor. It doesn’t take talent to be a liar. It doesn’t take guts to be a liar.”

  “But sometimes it does,” replied Horace. “Look at Takeo Yoshikawa. Here’s a Jap from Tokyo who knew as much about the U.S. Navy as anyone at Annapolis. He moves to Hawaii in ’41 and rents an apartment overlooking Pearl Harbor. Now, bear in mind that this kid is twenty-seven years old. He wanders around Oahu and takes notes on everything. He’s like a computer. He rents a single-engine prop plane and flies around the naval base. He fashions a reed into a breathing device so he can swim underwater. A swamp reed! That’s what he breathed through! If that happened in a John Wayne movie, you wouldn’t believe it. But it happened. He invented that. And this one little man—working completely alone—is the reason the Japs were able to deliver the most devastating blow in American history. And we never even caught him. He destroyed all his data on the day of the attack. He moved back to Japan and opened a candy store. And you know what he got for that? Do you know what his reward was? Nothing. He was ostracized. Once the war was over, the Jap media blamed him for starting it. They blamed him for Nagasaki! He died a despised man, trying to sell Tootsie Rolls to gutless freeloaders. So you tell me, Marvin: You explain to me how Takeo Yoshikawa didn’t have brains and guts. You explain to me how Takeo Yoshikawa didn’t lead a brilliant, tragic existence.”

  During the winter of 1982, Horace had read a 369-page biography titled The Brilliant, Tragic Existence of Takeo Yoshikawa.

  “Listen to this guy,” said Bud Haugen. “You’re like some kind of Berkeley professor now.”

  “I have always had an interest in espionage,” replied Horace.

  It was so goddamn annoying: What did Marvin Windows know about the motives of spies? Maybe their drive was completely internal. Maybe they just liked knowing things. In the context of war, the only people who know the real truth are the spies; they are the only ones who can tell the difference between what’s fact and what’s fiction. They are the only people with a fixed perspective. Everyone else can only build a reality out of propaganda and conjecture.

  Horace could have been one of these people.

  Seven years before she stopped sleeping, something appeared on Alma’s left areola. It looked like a black ladybug. It wasn’t hard, but it also wasn’t soft; it was alien. For weeks, they both examined it on a nightly basis. They poked at it with their index fingers. “What do you think it is?” Alma kept asking. “I do not know,” Horace replied a few dozen times. He told her to see a doctor. “I’m afraid of what he might tell me,” she kept saying. “That is why you need to go,” repeated Horace. “Please don’t tell anyone about this,” she said. “I won’t,” he replied.

  Variations of this conversation happened many, many times. It was their secret dilemma.

  Alma eventually saw her doctor on a rainy day in April. The man had no theories; he sent her to a different doctor. That one used a scalpel to slice part of it away; the cutting did not hurt Alma’s breast, which seemed like a bad sign. The doctor said he would conduct a battery of tests and would know more in seven to ten days. He did not seem particularly worried, but that signified nothing. The doctor was a stranger. His actions were meaningless.

  Horace and Alma worried about those tests, but not in the way that modern people worry: They did not talk about it, nor did they awkwardly avoid the subject on purpose. They just thought about the problem while doing other things. On the eighth day, Horace decided to think about the problem while he fixed the lawn mower (a few inches of bailing twine had become entangled around its blades). “I will be in the shop,” he called to Alma as he opened the back door. However, he did not go to the shop and he did not fix the mower; he let the door slam itself shut and quietly walked down the basement stairs. Sometimes he did this on lazy afternoons; sometimes Horace would proclaim that he was going to go outside to do something practical, but then he’d spontaneously elect to slink into the basement and sit on an army cot, alone in the dark, looking at nothing. He had behaved this way his entire life.

  It was cool in the basement. It was damp. Basements have predictable climates. Horace was sitting on the cot when the phone rang. He could follow Alma’s steps across the living room and into the kitchen. The rest of the house was soundless.

  “Hello,” she said. He could hear her voice, barely muffled by the floorboards.

  There was a pause.

  “Yes, this is she.” Pause. “Yes.” Pause. “Yes.” Pause. “Okay, what does that mean?” Long pause. “Oh, it’s so good to hear you say that.” Pause. “That’s what I thought, too. We got all worried over nothing.” Pause. “Good, good. Thanks for calling. Thank you. I will. I will.” The phone emitted a wounded ding when she hung up the receiver.

  Horace loved his wife, and he knew that he loved her. But he was still shocked by how wonderful this news made him feel. It was like an injection of morphine. He suddenly realized that he’d had a stomachache for more than a week; he didn’t realize this until it instantly evaporated. He felt like he was going to cry or puke or laugh. He began to thank God.

  Then he heard something else.

  He heard an unexpected, familiar sound: He heard the sound of a finger dragging the numbers on a rotary phone, counterclockwise. He heard that sound seven times in succession. There was another pause. And then he heard this:

  “Hey…they just called…no, just right now…it’s nothing…no, not cancer, not anything…they don’t really know for certain, but it’s nothing to worry about…I know…I know, honestly…no, not yet…I will…okay, I will…I will…bye-bye.” Alma hung up the phone. He heard her footfalls retrace across the house, returning toward the back door. He heard the door open. “Horace,” she called toward the shop. “Horace?”

  Now, there are men who would have heard this conversation and assumed what might seem apparent; they would have assumed their wife was sleeping with another man. But Horace was not one of those men. Was it possible that Alma was having an affair? Oh, it was possible. Anything is possible. Humans have walked on the moon. But it was not likely, and he was exceedingly confident of that. It was simply not in her nature. If Alma was having an affair, it would contradict everything he had ever known about who she was and how she lived; as a result, he would have to rethink everything he knew about every person he’d ever met. It was beyond reality. He did not overreact. But Horace had still learned something vital and complex: There was someone else in the world who knew all the things no one else was supposed to know. Clearly, there was someone to whom Alma told everything—perhaps even things she did not tell Horace. There was someone who likely knew details about his life that were profoundly private. There was someone who probably knew how much money he made, and what TV shows made him laugh, and how much he secretly hated his dead father’s dead father, and that he was deathly afraid of swooping birds. And he had no idea who this person was. He would never know whom his wife just called on the telephone.

  It was troubling.

  Yet, still…knowing it made him feel so much better. It made him feel smarter. And knowing it was enough. Nothing else was required. He did not need to confront Alma, and he did not need other people to recognize that he had been clever enough to deduce this truth.

  He could have been Takeo Yoshikawa.

  Horace began to walk up the staircase, his face showing nothing. He was a wall of bricks. “I’m down here, Alma,” he said. “I was looking for a Vise-Grip. Who was on the telephone?”

 
; He kissed his wife when she told him the good news. He acted surprised.