Lacking Character

by Curtis White

  After this odd pronouncement, the man was more dubious than ever.

  “Excuse me, but that don’t make a lot of sense.”

  “Well, let me show you then. You don’t happen to have a knife, do you?”

  “Better yet, I have a hacksaw that I take with me wherever I go, just in case.”

  “Okay, then, let’s go! Give me the saw!”

  They started in on a thigh, but, unfortunately, the saw was rusty and dull, so they had to take turns hacking at his leg. By the time they were done, they were perspiring and exhausted.

  “Whew!” said the man. “I’m all done in. For a guy who doesn’t really exist, you sure are hard.”

  Percy was lying back, panting. “Sorry, I had no idea.”

  “Well, let’s see what we got.”

  He lifted the stump of Percy’s leg and peered in.

  “What the hell is this?”

  “What is it?”

  “I can’t use this shit! I have to look after product quality, you know. Christ. All that work for nothing, plus I’m late now.”

  “Well, could you tell me what you see in there?”

  The man leaned over and closed one eye.

  “It’s hard to see.”

  He took out a lighter and flipped it on. He looked again. A fatty flap of tissue caught fire.

  “Well, I’ll be damned.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s spongy, or cheesy—a whey product? Greek yoghurt is not out of the question. Or tile grout? I feel that I could caulk a bathtub with it, or make a spread for canapés. There are almost-microscopic threads, reddish, suggesting a use in woven high-tech fabrics. I’m also tempted to say Cheez Whiz, but I don’t want to offend you.”

  “Cheez Whiz is bad?”

  “Some places—the bone, I suppose—are grainy like fine pumice. It flakes, and I can imagine someone saying that it’s desiccated. A very compelling contrast to the Whiz. If you were a work of art, I could comment on the dramatic juxtaposition of textures.”

  He looked at Percy quizzically.

  “You’re not a work of art, are you?”

  Replying frankly, Percy said, “I don’t think so. But perhaps that depends on whatever juxtaposition means.”

  “Look, sorry to have put you through all this, but you’re just not at all what I had in mind for my product line.”

  As suddenly as he had achieved inner clarity, Percy was struck with the stupidity of what he had done. Enlightened? He was worthless, not human, not someone’s Thing, not even a work of art. Plus he now only had one leg and would have to hop just to get back down in the ditch, if he could get up at all. Perhaps this inventor of New Age salves would help by giving him a good kick and rolling him down, like the businessman had done earlier.

  “I’m sorry too,” he said, “I feel like I’ve failed you.”

  Our homeopath entrepreneur looked puzzled and sad. Disappointed. Then, suddenly, he was enlightened! He saw the futility of trying, of grasping at worldly things, even the idea of seeing his salve on the shelves at Whole Foods no longer excited him. And he saw Percy now not as raw material but as part of a world of creatures that was suffering, in part because of his own folly, and he felt great compassion for him.

  “Listen,” he said, “I feel like I have disappointed you. I offered you hope but I failed.”

  Tiny high-viscosity tears gathered in Percy’s eyes and rolled down like leaking brake fluid.

  The man was abashed. He said, “Hey, let me help you get this leg back on your stump. I have some duct tape in the car and I’ll drive you to an emergency room or to a body shop, whatever you need. They can perform miracles with carbon fiber.”

  “No thanks.”

  “It’s no trouble.”

  “Forget it. I think I’d just like to be alone.”

  Not knowing what else to do, he placed the leg in Percy’s lap where it sat like an alien appendage.

  “Well, see ya.”

  “See ya.”

  Just then they heard a howling and yelping in the near distance, growing ever closer.

  And they were afraid.

  * * *

  —

  Story done, Alpha-Benji-Dog-God assumed a Samadhi pose and breathed slowly, the air passing rhythmically in and out through the gate of his lungs, his black lips pouting and quietly salivating.

  28.

  “Sending the young out into life with such a false psychological orientation is as if one were to equip people going on a polar expedition with summer clothing and maps of the Italian lakes”

  —FREUD

  —after Diderot

  Eventually, the Marquis sat Jake in the last chair at the last rickety table in the château and said, “Jake, I’ve reached a shocking and sad conclusion. We are no longer grand. We could call ourselves the nouveau pauvre, and I grant you that would have some remnant dignity in it, but even then we’d be kidding ourselves. We are like the aged grande dame in her rotting mansion who greets the doctor from the poor farm in her queenly silk shawl—never mind the gaps where moths and worms have eaten through and even begun to munch on her! In other words, we are done.”

  This was not news to Jake. “I know, Grandpa, we are poor,” he said.

  “Poor! There’d be some hope in mere poverty. We are rotting gods! And there is worse news. According to my banker, if we don’t acquire something called an income stream, we won’t even have this little château of ours. Then will come the last indignity: camping with those Occupy the Marquis people and living off donated sandwiches. I will be occupying myself! And I’m just about mad as hell enough to do it! And when that ends, we’ll simply be among the homeless, although even that term puts gold brocade on the corpse.”

  Self-pitying tears gathered in his eyes.

  He continued, “And then who will protect us from the aliens?! No one! They will run roughshod! And we, helpless, victims to every cruel alien whim! Oh, there will be a price to pay for my earlier excesses. But this will not go easy for these bankers, I promise you that. With the last of my resources I am building a turret on the roof, and I will place a forty-four-caliber machine gun in it. I got one on eBay yesterday. It says some assembly is required. I don’t suppose you’ve ever put one of these together, have you?”

  Jake looked to see if his grandpa were kidding about all this. He didn’t seem to be, and that worried him. He was under a lot of stress. Was he breaking down? Hallucinating? Was this the onset of dementia? Or was their earlier glory the hallucination?

  “Grandpa, to tell you the truth, I don’t think it would be so bad, living in a tent, even with Occupy people. It might even be fun to occupy Occupy. Actually, I was sitting with them just yesterday talking about music and philosophy and equality. I liked them.”

  A reasonably horrified look from the Marquis.

  “And just think how simple everything would be. No wife for me, no Rory for you.”

  “Jake, do not, do not, go all mendicant on me. Not now. Not in our moment of crisis. Trust me, a tent is not a good thing. We need to be thinking seriously about what to do, not indulging in Boy Scout fantasies. So let’s put our heads together over this income-stream thing.”

  “Well, what do you think the bankers mean by it?”

  The Marquis rose up and looked into Jake’s eyes. “It means you have to find a job.”

  “Find a job? Why me?”

  “You because you are the next generation, our future, in which we place great trust. Find because, apparently, they are hidden. The jobs, I mean.”

  “I wouldn’t know anything about it.”

  “I know, I know, and I blame myself for that.”

  Now, of course, Jake could have said, “Why don’t you find a job? It’s your château.” But he didn’t. You know Jake, by now. He had never done anything more than pay for Fanni’s dinner and hunch over Xbox controls, but that was not his fault. He’d never been given anything more to do. But, to his credit, he also didn’t put on airs. How could he? The
re was no room for air, thanks to Fanni’s firebombing of his heart.

  “I don’t know, Grandpa. I don’t think I can do it.”

  “Oh, my boy, cheer up. You’ll figure it out. Now, here’s what I’d like you to do. I’d like you to leave and seek a job. Call it a quest. A young man needs a good quest. Very romantic. And I’ll send Rory along to keep you company. I think I can spare him for a few years.”

  The Marquis laughed. The idea of life without Rory was a happy idea, especially if it didn’t involve moving into a tent.

  Jake stared at the Marquis, mouth wide.

  “Well, if you don’t like quests, let’s start by thinking of it as a vacation then, how about that? Surely you can handle that. But what is a vacation a vacation from? A job! So what I’m thinking is this: start with the vacation and that will develop naturally into a vacation companion piece: a job! And thus: an income stream!”

  “This is very confusing, Grandpa.”

  “A stream, my boy, a mountain stream! What a lovely word! And what a wonderful world! A world in which things are the way they are because that’s the way they are! That’s the kind of clear thinking we need! And you’re just the right kind of boy for it: a working boy! It is time to serve! You are called to duty! Rise up now and shine! Make me proud of you! Serve your country, or at least serve me!”

  * * *

  —

  The very next morning Jake and Rory set out on their job search. True, Jake did it with some reluctance and for two very particular reasons. First, he had no idea of what he was doing, what he was looking for, or how he would know if he found it. Second, he was half convinced that his grandfather was, as someone somewhere used to say, “tetched.” But, as we know, Jake was a sensitive boy and he always tried to do what he was told.

  The truth is that Jake and Rory set out on beat-up bicycles that had been left behind by the Occupy the Marquis people, but that sounds pathetic. So, at the risk of an anachronism, I’d like to propose that we say they were on horses. Nice horses, well brushed, shiny, and with big brown eyes that were intelligent if always just a little frightened.* Everyone loves a beautiful horse, whereas if I said that they were on bicycles so beat-up that not even the bottom 1% of the bottom 99% would bother with them, you’d lose all respect for their journey. So, let’s go with the horses.

  So Jake and Rory were going up old Route 51 on their horses when Jake said to Rory, “Do you know what a job is?”

  “Well, sir, to the best of my knowledge there are two kinds of job. The first is a greeter. The second hands over the French fries.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That seems to be the consensus of opinion. It’s true that there are some, called geeks, who have jobs working with computers, but that is not for us. They are our betters, as the Marquis might say.” He sighed. “The sad thing is that he continues to believe he is a superior being, a member of the nobility. Of course, there is no nobility, and, as well you know, he has no life outside what has been provided for him by those very geeks, hence his precious Halo.”

  “What about your job?”

  “Precisely.”

  “Do you mean that you are a greeter?”

  “I have greeted people. Sometime, I’d love to tell you about the night I greeted the masked man.”

  “A masked man?”

  “Yes. He was a faggot.”

  “…?”

  “A pile driver?”

  “…?”

  “Let’s leave that for now.”

  “I just want to understand what you’re saying.”

  “Well, then, I think it’s most accurate to say that my job with the Marquis has transcended its origins.”

  “I think it means you don’t do anything at all, and you are exploiting my papa’s kindness.”

  “Or his stupidity.”

  Jake gave Rory a hard look.

  Rory, brightly: “But come, sir, we’ll have lots of time to talk about jobs. Why don’t we talk about sex instead? Isn’t that what men do when they travel beyond the hearing of women?”

  Jake groaned. “You sound like my wife.”

  Coyly, “Sir!”

  “Sex is what I’m trying to leave behind. I don’t understand why people get so excited about it. It seems trivial to me. I think that if someone just stood up and said that once, we’d all come to our senses. Someone, some innocent, needs to point at it in its ridiculousness and say, ‘Why are they doing that silly thing?’ and it would all just come tumbling down, the whole corrupt edifice.”

  Rory looked at Jake skeptically. “That sounds anti-American, sir.”

  “Look, we have a long way to go, so why don’t we just ride in silence for a while?”

  “Hmmm. Silence is not my strong suit. Would you mind if I dropped back a few yards and talked to myself?”

  They rode north in silence for the remainder of the day, although every now and then Rory could be heard giggling, like a little parrot that is happy with itself.

  * Why is it that horses always look terrified? You know, on edge so that a little mouse could send them running in horror across the countryside, your eight-year-old son hanging on for dear life? I always want to say to them, “Look, you have nothing to fear, you’re big!”

  29.

  “Modern man drags along with him a huge quantity of indigestible stones.”

  —NIETZSCHE

  It wasn’t just that Rory bugged him. It was more the depressing feeling that bringing Rory along meant bringing along the world he was trying to leave behind: a world of confusion and pain.

  This raw fact was brought home for Jake on the first night. They were setting up Jake’s little pup tent on the side of the road. Rory had a small duffel bag full of all sorts of things none of which was a tent. He spread them out on the ground in front of Jake’s tent.

  Of particular note, the duffel contained: a fragment of a map, a sealed letter without an address, a lottery ticket, and a revolver, a Smith and Wesson snub-nose .38, a cop gun or a midnight special, depending on which direction it is facing.

  “Why did you bring this stuff?”

  Rory wagged his head like a Hindu: “I brought only what was essential.”

  “Essential? Essential to what?”

  “Sir, our quest! Our saga! Our legend! Our little drop of water in the Ocean of Story!”

  “I know I’m going to be sorry for asking, but what are you talking about?”

  “Isn’t it obvious? The map is in case we get lost.”

  “But you can’t even see what it’s a map of.”

  “Well, if you’re going to be difficult, then it’s a map showing us our destination. See the big X there? It marks the spot. So, when we find the whole map that this is part of, we will be able to go to the place I’ve marked.”

  “You marked it?”

  “Yes.”

  “And I suppose you also tore this piece from the map.”

  Rory glowed.

  “Then you should know where we’re going.”

  This time, a glorious smile.

  “Well, don’t tell me. I don’t want to ruin the surprise. What about the letter?”

  “Interesting point, sir. At present, we do not know whom it is for. But when we get to the place on the map, we will know, and we will address it to her.”

  “How do you know it’s a woman?”

  “Sir, unlike the masked man, I am not a cowboy swish.”

  “…”

  “A maricón? Do you speak Spanish?”

  “And the lottery ticket?”

  “That, sir, is a winning ticket and the end of all our worries about jobs. But you should note that it is only half of the ticket.”

  “And so we’re also looking for the person who has the other half?”

  “Yes.”

  “So we’re looking for a map, the address for the intended recipient of a sealed letter, and the owner of the other half of a lottery ticket. That’s a lot of looking.”

  “I thought it woul
d cheer you up and keep you busy in case the job hunt was discouraging.”

  Jake looked thoughtfully at Rory’s possessions, which were laid out so neatly before his little tent. He smiled.

  “Has it occurred to you that the other half of the lottery ticket might be in the envelope?”

  Rory laughed disdainfully. “Oh, sir, that is a wicked thought. Nevertheless, that may very well be true. But the letter also contains a curse. It can only be opened by the person to whom it is addressed.”

  “A curse?”

  “A curse.”

  “And who cursed it? You?”

  “Sir!”

  “But we won’t know who the letter is addressed to until we get to the spot on the map.”

  “Correct.”

  “At which point we mail the letter.”

  “Right.”

  “But then we have to go seeking the woman to whom it is addressed, in order to get the other half of the ticket?”

  “Very good, sir.”

  “Why don’t we just take the letter with us and hand it to her?”

  “That is a devious thought. It’s no wonder your life has come to such ruin that you must seek a job.”

  “Never mind that. Okay, so let’s say I play along. We mail the envelope and follow it ourselves. But she won’t be at that address, will she?”

  “Probably not.”

  “But there’s something else there, right?”

  “There may be a sealed box there that grants wishes so long as you don’t open the box.”

  “I have a few wishes.”

  “That’s only human, sir.”

  “Is there ever an end to our saga?”

  “That’s not for me to say.”

  “Okay, I get it. So, let’s say, purely speculatively, that in desperate, drunken despair I open the envelope now.”

  “Oh, my dear boy, that is what the handgun is for.”

  * * *

  —

  Later:

  Jake: “I can’t believe you didn’t bring a sleeping bag.”

  “Cuddles?”

  Later.

  “Rory?”