“I hope you’re right. And I hope we won’t have to wait long.”
“Do not concern yourself. It is quite close.”
Harry returned within ten minutes. He had the stamp in one hand and the ink pad in the other and a broad smile on his face. “You have the greens?” he said.
“Sure.” I reached into my pocket and put the envelope with three hundred in twenties on the counter. He opened the envelope and counted the bills twice. But he counted by two’s, so the total came to thirty. He peeled off five twenties and handed them to Ashok.
“First rate,” he said and his smile became broader. “Give me the document you want notarized.”
I took out the rollover form and put it on the counter. Then I bent over it and carefully copied my wife’s meticulous signature. It was the signature of the kind of schoolteacher I had in the first grade, the one with wrinkled skin and blue hair that looked like cotton candy who taught us perfect penmanship, practicing day after day until the handwriting of everyone in the class was identical to the script of that little old lady.
When I was finished, I gave Harry the form. He made a big event out of breathing on the stamp and inking it several times. Then he raised his hand with a flourish and brought the stamp down sharply onto the page. He signed an unintelligible signature and inspected his handiwork with evident satisfaction.
“Here you go,” he said and handed the form back to me. “I hope you get what you want.”
I inspected the seal carefully. “There’s something wrong here,” I said. “I thought your name was Haresh. It says here your name is Charles Goldberg.”
He guffawed. “That’s right. For purposes of notarization, my name is Charles Goldberg. But you can call me Charlie.” He laughed again at my naivete.
I glanced at the old man. He shrugged and said, “Things are not always as they seem. Sometimes one must accept a slight variation in order to achieve one’s goal. Just ask yourself, which is more important – to be absolutely scrupulous concerning the letter of the law or to accomplish what you want in order to further your happiness. This I cannot answer for you. You must answer it yourself.”
I’d always been a diligent subscriber to the Anglo-Saxon creed of fair play and following the rules. Never had a speeding ticket. Never played hooky from school. Never had sex without a condom. And look where it had gotten me. Squarely at the bottom of the slag heap after all that time and effort. It seemed to me that it was altogether fitting to make a fundamental shift to the new world of situational ethics. If it was practiced at the highest levels of government and industry, why shouldn’t the lowest member of society follow the leaders.
Situational ethics it was, then. A forged or stolen notary public stamp to verify the authenticity of a forged signature.
It was a perfect and fearful symmetry.
CHAPTER IX
The young black woman in the Human Resources department didn’t appear overjoyed to see me. She glanced up from the tall stack of papers on her desk and squinted at me with displeasure. I was obviously distracting her from the press of work she had before her.
She made an ostentatious show of sighing and stuck her finger in the pile of paperwork to mark her place.
“What do you want now?” she said.
“I have that notarized consent form for the 401K rollover.”
She nodded. “That’s good.” She looked down at the pile of papers and resumed flipping through them. “Just leave the form in the In basket.”
Just marvelous, I thought. This bitch had no idea of the trouble I went through to complete the requirements. To her, it was just a routine authorization, but to me it was a ticket to heaven through the Brandenburg Gate with a choir of angels singing in blissful harmony. Why couldn’t she take it from me and hold it up against the light to scrutinize it and say what an outstanding job this was and how pleased she was I had given it to her?
I stood there staring at her. There was something attractive about her surly demeanor. Perhaps she needed a corporate lesson in sensitivity training. The grizzly in me started stirring with primordial thoughts of copulation. A big white lumbering grizzly and a young black woman with very short curly hair.
She looked up to see me still there. “Oh,” she said. “Don’t forget you also need a copy of your wife’s driver’s license and your marriage certificate. If I’m not here, you can just slip them under the door.”
I was prepared for her. My checklist was rapidly being crossed off. “You should be grateful I make your job so easy.” I tossed the copies onto her desk. They landed squarely on top of the papers she was going through. She picked the copies up without looking at them and put them in the In box on top of my rollover form.
“I’ll get to them when I have time,” she said by way of dismissal. “I can’t do them right now.”
But I didn’t leave. I just stood there and smiled at her. “Do you still like me?” I said.
Her eyes widened and her nostrils flared. It was the hard-wired primitive instinct that told her something unpleasant was about to happen. She pretended she didn’t hear me and returned to her papers. If she ignored me, maybe I would go away.
Or maybe I wouldn’t. I was the new man. Without fear and freed of all inhibitions because there were no consequences. For the first time, I was no longer a diminutive drudge, one of the faceless corporate employees who receive a weekly infusion of direct deposit electronic funds into their checking accounts.
“Do you still like me?” I repeated.
She bit her lip. “Yes, I like you. Now go away and leave me alone.”
But that wasn’t enough. “Would you like to go out to dinner with me some evening?”
She looked at me as if she wanted to separate my gonads from my torso. And I believe she could have done it with her bare hands and without anesthesia. “No. It’s company policy. I can’t go out with anyone from the company,” she said through clenched teeth.
I was gleeful. “But I’m leaving the company, so you can go out with me,” I said with impeccable logic. I had to compound the felony. “You said you liked me.”
“I said I liked you because I didn’t want to offend you.” She spoke very slowly and enunciated each word clearly. You could see it was a major effort for her to control herself. “And I still don’t want to offend you.”
“Why?” I said. “Because you might lose your job?”
She shook her head. “I don’t want to go out with you.”
“Why not?”
She glanced at the rosebud vase on her desk and I had the feeling she was ready to hurl it at me. “Because I don’t want to, that’s all. I don’t want to go out with you ever, so don’t ask me.”
“But why not?” I insisted. “You said you liked me.”
She exhaled very slowly. “I like you as an employee, but I don’t like you as a person.”
“Well then, will you go out to dinner with me as an employee?”
She slammed the papers down on her desk and got up and stood there glaring at me. “I wouldn’t go out to dinner with you if I was dying of hunger. You’re a nasty man and you’re bothering me and I want you to get out of my office right now.”
I looked at her. “Well, does that mean a blow job is out of the question?” I said.
CHAPTER X
I took the first of my cash withdrawals. Seven thousand dollars. Small enough to fly under the bank reporting act radar screen. But large enough to put a pleasant bulge in my pants pocket.
The teller raised her eyebrows when she saw the withdrawal slip.
“Are you sure you want this in cash?” she said. “Don’t you want a cashier’s check?”
“I’m tired of cashier’s checks. I want to feel some real money in my sweaty palms.”
She was young. Her lips were swollen with collagen and she licked them as she counted out the bills. Those lips looked like they held the promise of unspoken pleasures. Why do girls become bank tellers? Because they like to be in the presence of
large sums of money?
When she’d finished counting, she looked up and smiled at me. “Would you like me to put it in an envelope?”
“I don’t see how you can put it in an envelope,” I said. I wasn’t referring to the money.
She shook her head. “I don’t understand.”
“Never mind. I’ll just take the cash and roll it up and stick the rolls in my pockets.”
After all those years of barely scraping by and skimping on pennies, it felt good to have a large sum of money in my hand. Enough to blot out any immediate concerns about food, clothing, shelter and the pursuit of happiness.
But why was I doing this? I’d always sought a condition of perfect homeostasis. An ideal balance without risk or pain. Just a comfortable existence with no need to worry about uncertainty. Now I was throwing it over to plunge into the unpredictable life that existed for millennia before the state started taking care of us. We’ve all forgotten, in our carefully-calibrated environment, that our existence is a fragile tissue. They knew this in the old days, our ancestors, with their thousand superstitions and petty rules to ward off bad fortune. They knew that, in the blink of an eye, children could die, a famine could starve the multitudes, a plague could decimate a town, marauders could massacre an entire family without shedding a tear of pity. Life was precarious. There was no penicillin, no food stamps, no price supports for farmers. You lived and you died. Period. Your survival was nasty, short and brutish. That was it. Occasionally, you copulated or ate a good meal, if you were lucky.
And now I was taunting the fates by disturbing the universe.
*
“What age do you want to be?” the old man asked, as he wagged his little head from side to side.
I was fifty, but I wanted to be forty again. That was it. I shall be forty again. Not many men were given the opportunity to do it over. “I want to be forty,” I said.
The old man nodded. “Very well. I will make your birth date ten years later, but not to the very day. That will make it too easy to trace you. It is always better to confuse the issue, you see.” He studied my driver’s license. “This picture makes you look melancholy.” He pronounced the last word with a musical lilt. “You should try to smile to show the world that you are not worried. You should always try to display confidence and enthusiasm. It will improve your spirit.”
If the old man could see that my spirit was flagging, then it must have been obvious for others to see. I resolved to smile more. It might not help, but it would fool them.
It was late afternoon and the sunlight was diffused through some high clouds. The store was dark because the old man, perhaps because of an old Hindu mindset concerning the waste of precious nonrenewable energy resources, had not turned on most of the lights. The only illumination came from fluorescent bulbs in the dingy display cases which lit his ancient face from below and made his eyes look like black holes.
“And from where do you want to be?” Ashok asked.
I’d given this some thought. I decided I’d be from Troy. Nobody was from Troy. Nobody knew Troy. I gave him an address in Troy, New York that I’d looked up on the internet. Besides, I liked the mythological implications. Imagine being a voyager from Troy on some historical journey to snatch the beautiful Helen (who wasn’t from Troy, indeed). It had a nice resonance to it.
“Have you decided who you wish to be?”
I nodded. The metaphysical decision had been made. I would become another person. Something with an ethnic flavor to fit with my new surroundings. I’d no longer be heir to the traditional stock that had made this country great. Those tall forebears of northern European heritage with their stolid and dour demeanor and inbred distrust of sunny and warm climates where people actually lazed on soft sandy beaches and never gave a thought to work. My new identity would have a soft beat to it – Tony Mendes. To-ny-Men-des. To-ny-Men-des. Four syllables but a world apart. It sounded like a beat on a conga drum or waves washing against an outrigger canoe.
“My name will be Tony Mendes,” I told the little old man. I spelled it for him.
He smiled sweetly. “I like the sound of it. I believe it will suit you nicely.” He motioned to the back of the store. “There is one more thing. We have to take your photograph. Please come with me.”
“Wait,” I said. “I’m not ready for that.”
“But why not?”
“First, I have to shave off my beard and cut my hair and …”
He nodded. “I see. You wish to change your appearance for the photograph.” He paused and squinted at me. “And why are you doing this? Are you in trouble with the law? Have you committed some sort of crime?”
“No, no. Nothing like that.”
“Some sort of trouble with a female, then?”
I gave him a loud guffaw. “Sure. That’s my fondest wish. Female trouble.” I shook my head. “No such luck.”
He persisted. “Then why are you doing this?”
“I don’t know really. I just know I can’t continue with my life the way it’s been. I need a rebirth. A new life, a chance to start over and wipe away all the mistakes I’ve made. I have to become a new person.” I put my hand on his shoulder and peered into those black holes where his eyes should have been. “You should know about this. Your faith puts great store in reincarnation.”
“Yes,” he said. “That is true. However, to be reincarnated, one usually must die first.”
CHAPTER XI
The Super Stop and Shop in Westport is a big store. It’s so large and has such a broad selection of goods that it seems like the culmination of the evolution of the consumer society. How many varieties of pet food and household cleaners and breakfast cereals do we really need? How many different flavors of nacho chips are necessary? Variations upon variations abounded. When I was growing up, you had Wheaties and Cheerios and Rice Krispies. Now there were cereals made from recombinant grains and sweetened with chemicals that caused tumors in laboratory rats.
I stood in front of a profusion of cereals that extended almost the length of the store aisle and wondered if people actually bought some of the more obscure brands and, if not, how long those packages had remained on the shelves and what their expiration dates were.
Then I considered how highly polished the floor was and if customers slipped on it because it was so shiny.
All of these thoughts passed through my mind because I preferred to waste time rather than go home and spend another dreary night with my wife. Another bland dinner and another bland conversation and then television and then to bed. And then rise again and take the same commuter train into the city and sit in the same seat and see the same faces of my exhausted fellow commuters and read the same stories in The New York Times. The same stories of low-intensity conflicts in third world countries. Then put words on labels all day and then take the same commuter train home in a never-ending circle of despair.
I was tired of commuting and I was tired of bill collectors and I was tired of putting words on labels. I wanted to simplify my life to the barest essentials, the way life was before everything started moving so fast. Before they took time away from us and shortened the day so there weren’t enough hours to contemplate the eternal verities. Before there was too much information. Before they broadcast people engaged in the act of sex and said the word “Fuck” on Public Television.
At the far end of the aisle, next to the adult diapers stood my son, his back to me. He was putting a six-pack of Budweiser into his cart. I could recognize the familiar tilt of his head and his shock of unruly black hair. He was wearing a sleeveless T-shirt and cut-off jeans and sneakers with no socks. It was a cool day but he was dressed as if it was the hottest day of the year.
His broad shoulders and back were more muscular than I remembered. He must have been working out at the gym or perhaps his job at the garage was strenuous enough to build him up. I always thought he would have been a good football player with his strength and coordination.
I waited motionless
for a minute or two just watching him and then walked up to him and put my hand on his. He turned around quickly and took a step backward when he saw it was me. There was a fleeting look behind his eyes that I couldn’t make out.
“Hello, Son,” I said.
“Hello, Dad.” He stood there facing me, his feet planted like trees and his arms folded across his chest. He leaned forward slightly, like a ballplayer leaning into a pitch.
“How’ve you been?”
He shrugged. He’d always been a boy of few words. Was it Wittgenstein who said if you have nothing worthwhile to speak, then you must be silent?
“I’m glad I ran into you,” I said. “There’s something I have to tell you.”
He swung his cart around and started to walk away. “There’s nothing you can tell me I didn’t hear before.”
I ran after him. “You haven’t heard this before. It’s something that will surprise you.”
“I don’t like surprises,” he said. “And I don’t like you.”
I followed him as he walked down the aisle with a thousand varieties of condiments. “Don’t you want to hear what I have to say?”
“No.”
“Please,” I said.
He stopped and swung his cart around so it stood between us. In the cart was his beer, his cigarettes and his frozen French fries. But there was no ketchup. He didn’t look at me. He looked into the cart and said, “I don’t want to hear what you have to say, ever again.”
CHAPTER XII
I felt the need to take leave of Sandy in an ordered manner. My boss, Sandy. He of the prognathous jaw and lumpen stolidity. There should be a regular corporate farewell, complete with handshake and square look in the eye and serious set to the jaw. One of those standard corporate rituals, like a Viking funeral with sails billowing and flames blazing.
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