Waxwings

by Unknown

  Steve had taken San Francisco by stealth over the course of a year, moving quietly from neighborhood to neighborhood, sneaking first across the Bay Bridge into Oakland, then, weeks later, across the Golden Gate into Marin County. But buoyed by the recent surge of investment in the company, he’d promised to take Chicago by storm. On March 4, more than a hundred neighborhoods were to go online at once.

  In what people now called “physical Chicago,” every commuter route was punctuated with billboards that changed each week in a teasing ad campaign—this week’s message was GET A . . . LIFE?—and parallel campaigns were running on local radio and TV stations. By the launch weekend, it would be hard for anyone living in the region to be unaware of the site. If San Francisco had fallen to word-of-mouth, Chicagoland would capitulate to the trumpet blasts of prime-time commercials— whose cost was going to at least double the company’s burn-rate in the next quarter.

  With less than two months to go, Steve was afraid they’d run smack into a wall of arrogant old-economy midwestern cynicism—“the stockyard mentality,” as he called it. Realtors were reluctant to come on board until more merchants had signed up, and merchants were holding back because of doubtful realtors. There were still several neighborhoods whose streets were entirely empty of links to click on, and many more in which you’d find only a couple of houses and a Bank of America. Worse yet, some forty neighborhoods didn’t even exist—no maps, no texts, no links, no nothing.

  Half the marketing department had been relocated to the Chicago Hilton. Steve himself was spending two and sometimes three days a week on Michigan Avenue, taking the midnight flight out of Sea-Tac on United, landing at O’Hare at five-thirty, drumming up business in wall-to-wall meetings through the day, then reappearing in the Seattle office at around nine o’clock the same evening, looking shattered and dangerous. He was said to fly coach.

  Meanwhile, in anticipation of a triumph in Chicago, the stock rose by $21.00 in the first two weeks of January. Eleven of eighteen portfolio analysts tracked by Zacks were rating GSHK as Strong Buy, with a High Risk caveat attached. But inside the Klondike, there was none of the usual euphoria at a new hike in the stock-price; rather, the Nasdaq numbers were seen as a measure of the burden that was increasing, daily, on everybody in the building. To dampen the inflated expectations of the market now would imperil the Chicago operation, and put GetaShack.com itself in jeopardy. Pills and powders were trading freely from work-station to work-station: No-Doz, Xanax, coke, diazepam, methamphetamines, Ativan, Halcyon; uppers, downers, rollers, soothers, wakers, sleepers. The smokers’ ghetto on the First Avenue sidewalk drew a dozen new regulars, as did the Mexican restaurant a couple of blocks south on Second, where the techies drank Tequila Screwdrivers at strange and antisocial hours.

  The elevators began to smell of people who’d skipped their last several showers. The company masseuse now spent most of her time reading Harry Potter books in her unpatronized spa. The laziest of Steve’s employees felt compelled to at least feign distracted frenzy, and were surreptitious about their visits to Priceline.com for bargain getaways to Acapulco and Honolulu.

  Even Robert, Beth’s assistant, seemed to have grown up fast. “It’s getting to be like the Donner Party,” he said. “Soon we’ll have to eat our dead.”

  In this overcharged atmosphere, one person was entirely at ease. Suspended from Treetops, Finn roamed through Editorial like a Parisian flâneur, helping himself from the bowls of power bars and M&Ms, drinking from a can of chilled soda. Seven dogs lived on the floor, and he knew all their names, visiting each in turn with Milk-Bones. He hung out in the kitchen-area, where you could explode free packs of popcorn in the microwave, and played on the Ms. Pac-Man game machine. Then he drew pictures of the seven dogs on the whiteboard, with markers from the supply closet.

  He really liked GetaShack. Everything was free. Nobody messed with him. Nobody yelled or got mad. He never saw anyone bossing someone around. Everybody did their own thing, like playing on their computer or talking to their friends on the phone, whatever. When they got tired, they took naps on the floor. They didn’t have to ask when they went to the bathroom. They just went—and often grabbed a fistful of candy on the way back.

  Looking over this labyrinth of brilliant cubicles, Finn saw a world he could admire and comprehend. He liked it best when he crouched on his haunches and could see, below the partititions, the enormous interesting disorder of disembodied legs and feet, shopping bags, shoes, slithering black cables, wastebaskets, handbags, backpacks, printers, laptops in shiny leather cases, toy robots (he mapped these carefully), sleeping dogs, and sleeping people. He watched one bare foot attached to a hairy ankle—much hairier than his dad’s—that was tapping up and down on the floor. The cool thing was, he couldn’t begin to guess who the foot belonged to. It had big yellow curling toenails. As he watched, the words of a song attached themselves to the movements of the foot:

  Row, row, row the boat,

  Gently down the stream.

  Throw the teacher overboard

  And listen to her scream.

  Beth was everywhere and nowhere in her corner cubicle. Hyde Park was on the screen, which also framed a half-written letter to Treetops in a window. Dr. Karen Eusebio’s answerphone was on her headset, Robert was signaling to her over the top of the partition, and on her lap was the hard-copy text of a piece on Wrigleyville by a Chicago Reader writer. Though the machine was not immediately in view, she heard the hoarse chuckle of the paper-cutter on the fax announce yet another document requiring her urgent attention. Even as she pulled an I’m not here! face at Robert, while asking Dr. Eusebio, in her politest Smith College voice, to call her back, Beth’s mind was otherwise engaged.

  Since waking at four-thirty that morning, she’d been conducting a one-sided quarrel with Debra, who the previous night had casually, even gaily, convicted Tom of offences that would send him, strapped to a gurney in the state penitentiary at Walla Walla, to a lethal injection. “Everybody says . . .” she kept on saying. Beth had hung up on her in mid-sentence, then collapsed, shuddering with sobs, on to the couch, terrified of waking Finn. For a period of seconds, she had actually imagined the gurney—first the saline drip, then the anesthetizing barbiturate, then—before anger and a proper sense of the ridiculous drove the hideous picture from her head.

  How dare she?

  Of course Tom was hopeless. As far out of touch with other people as he was with himself, he was like fog in human form. But for Debra to call him a psychotic predator, and to suggest that his swift incarceration was “frankly in his own best interest,” was unforgiveable. It was sick.

  Everybody says? That would be Debra herself, yakking to her Oroonoko friends around the water-cooler and making it sound like she’d had dinner with Ted Bundy.

  A loud ping from the computer drew her attention back to the screen, where both Hyde Park and her Treetops letter had been eclipsed by a message from Steve Litvinof. Over Christmas, the techies had rigged the system so Steve could bypass the mailbox with Hot Wires that plonked themselves directly on to the screen of his victims. Outlined in large blood-red asterisks, they were headed “From Steve.” When Robert saw his first Hot Wire, he nasally intoned: “For I your God am a jealous god, and thou shalt have no other gods but me.”

  This one read:

  forest glen

  i just went there and i take exception with your guy he targets

  wrong demographic and cool in the online environment is

  smart not smartass plus when i go to a neighborhood i want to

  visit a place not a software application i want more tactile I

  WANT TO SMELL IT like lakeview is strong but forest glen

  sucks mostly cos guy has bad case of the snoots and thats not

  what were about

  remember we have a customer obsessed culture in this

  company and always ask self question do i want to buy in here?

  in lakeview i want to be part of that communit
y in forest glen

  what i want to do is sneer

  recommission and dont use guy again?

  aloha steve

  Beth knew Forest Glen was no good. She’d put it up only as a temporary filler for one of the many blank spaces on the map, but she ought to have known that Steve, a notorious micromanager, would instinctively sniff it out and hold it up to scorn. Maddeningly, as usual, he was right.

  Like a small spider scuttling by on the extreme periphery of her vision, the thought crossed Beth’s mind that when she next encountered her ex-friend in the Belgrave Pointe elevator, she’d tell her what she really thought of her dipshit fishing column.

  “Hi.” Finn had appeared at the entrance to her cubicle, holding in his hand a flashing, chattering, moving toy.

  “Hey, pumpkin. How are you doing?”

  “Good. Jason gave me this robot. To keep.”

  Beth couldn’t quite think of who Jason was. “Cute,” she said.

  His mom, Finn noticed, looked like she had bruises around her eyes. She looked like a stranger.

  “I’m sorry, pumpkin. I’m sorry I’m so busy.”

  “That’s okay.” He wanted to get another power bar and go see Sasha the pug.

  “I’m trying as hard as I can to get you back into Treetops—maybe even tomorrow.”

  “I don’t want to go back to Treetops. Everybody hates me.”

  The looky-loos, or the police, were breaking in.

  A thrashing noise down by the front door was followed by a series of peremptory bangs. When Tom incautiously shifted his head on the pillow, it was as though a steel knitting needle had been driven through his skull, an inch or two above and in front of his ears. Maneuvering himself into an old bathrobe of Beth’s, he was strangely weightless, his whole being distilled into the throbbing pain between his temples and a pure, thin, high-octane fury at his visitors, who by the sound of things were now ramming the door with a telephone pole. He grabbed his glasses from the bedside table.

  “For Christ’s sake, stop! I’m coming!”

  He descended the stairs in a single movement that felt like a bungee-jump from a high bridge. In the curtained darkness, he couldn’t tell if it was night or day. Flinging the front door open, he found a single blue-coated figure kneeling on the porch and hammering a nail into a plank.

  “Oh. It’s you.”

  It was neither night nor day. The streetlamp showed as a fuzzy corona in the saturated air. Under the hood of his gleaming anorak, Chick’s upturned face was pale and owlish, the features indistinct in the half-light.

  “Hi—how ya doin’?” There was a warning absence of inflection in the contractor’s voice.

  “I left messages for you, on your pager. I drove around looking for you.”

  “Yeah.” Chick banged home another nail, and it could hardly have hurt more than if he’d pounded it directly into Tom’s frontal lobe. “Been flying around like a fart in a whirlwind.”

  Again the voice was flat, whispery and, to Tom’s ear, laden with rancour. “I’m glad to see you.”

  “It’s not a problem.” His hammer was raised.

  Tom squinched his eyes shut in preparation for the blow, and said, “Lázaro and the others? Not here today?”

  The contractor stared at him. Tom had seen as much human warmth in the eyes of the Komodo dragons in Woodland Park Zoo.

  “Not here today.” The phrase came back with a mocking echo of Tom’s question still attached to it.

  “Look, I’m sorry about the other night. I was in a panic. It was quite unnecess—”

  “A panic,” Chick said, with a distinct note of interest.

  “Yes. Panic. It’s when . . .” With his Wooster-sized hangover, Tom was not of much use as a dictionary. “When you get irrationally frightened about something.” Now he’d have to explain irrationally. He was on the verge of doing so when a weird smile, not friendly, spread across Chick’s face, and Tom saw himself in the smile: his limbs sticking out like a giant’s from the tiny bathrobe, the stink of stale alcohol and night-sweat on him, his ash-gray wilderness of hair.

  In self-defense he said, “I need to make some coffee. Do you want some?”

  “No coffee.” Chick picked up the New York Times from the edge of the deck, rose to his feet, and handed the paper to Tom. “Please—I go toilet. Gotta make a dump.”

  In the kitchen, spooning coffee with an unsteady hand into the filter-basket, Tom heard the sound of rushing water overhead. Was Chick taking a bath up there? He shook the newspaper from its blue plastic sheath and tried to read, the print wobbling in and out of focus. Even familiar words looked strange and misspelled. It was voting-day in the New Hampshire primary. By the end of the second paragraph, he had to start over again to make any sense of the story. Then the name Seattle jumped out at him from a neighboring column. There’d been an air crash—that much, at least, he managed to glean from the swarming text, before the contractor appeared, walrus-like, the silky hairs of his moustache plastered to his upper lip. For a crapulous instant, it seemed that Chick had just escaped from the air crash.

  “Sorry?” Tom said, looking up over the top of his glasses.

  “Nine hundred dollar.”

  “What?”

  “Nine hundred dollar. To finish porch.”

  Tom realized that Chick must have been talking to him for quite a while beforehand. Strange how time passed in a bad hangover: everything seemed to happen either in slo-mo or fast-forward, with all the normal bits left out, as in some experimental film.

  “Oh—yes, of course.” Conscious of having behaved badly, Tom felt that $900, which he still thought of as £450 in real money, was the least he could pay in reparation.

  In excruciating slo-mo, the contractor set off on an indignant tirade about the cost of paint, as if, having come prepared for an argument, he was unwilling to be cheated out of presenting his case. There was no stopping his English now: it flowed out of him in a babbling stream of vernacular. “Totally,” he kept on saying—and “gazillion” and “el ropo” and “scumbag.” Tom nodded obediently. “Fuckwits!” Chick concluded, then went back to the deck to resume his mind-splitting percussions, in which he was immediately joined by a radio, turned up to full blast on a rock station. As Tom tried to disentangle the facts of the crash from the paper, he heard Eddie Vedder singing “Nothingman.”

  An afternoon flight from Puerto Vallarta to Seattle via San Francisco had gone down in the Pacific near Malibu. “Skies were clear,” the Times said. The pilots had reported “mechanical difficulties,” and asked permission to land at LAX, shortly before the aircraft plummeted into the sea from 17,000 feet. Tom imagined that fall. It must’ve taken minutes, not seconds—ample time to take stock of what was happening, and to reflect on how one had so very nearly not been on this flight at all . . . how one should really have been at home, or at work, or still lazing on the beach back in Mexico. When a plane went into free fall, how long would it take to lose consciousness? An eternity too long.

  Beth had talked of taking Finn to Puerto Vallarta, “if there’s a lull in the Chicago jihad.”

  There’d been five crew on board and eighty-three passengers. Coast Guard boats and rescue helicopters had found floating bodies but no survivors. Clergy and “grief counselors,” those gruesome death professionals, had marshalled at San Francisco and Sea-Tac airports. Tom pictured going to meet Beth and Finn, only to encounter some hand-wringing, sickly-smiling, Uriah Heepish reverend. What would one say? “Not today, thank you”?

  The public address system at the airport made periodic announcements that anyone waiting to meet a passenger on Flight 261 should report to a ticket agent.

  You’d probably think that you’d misheard the number. The ticket agent wouldn’t tell you anything, of course. She’d instruct you to go to a special room, a long walk away from the counter, which would turn out to be full of people with crumpled faces, weeping, shaking, blankly staring. But you’d have guessed by then; you’d be steeled for
it. There’d even be a kind of relief at having one’s fears so extravagantly confirmed, like the patients who said “Thank you” to the doctor for telling them they had six weeks to live. The hardest thing would be to manage one’s getaway from the grief counselor and find a private place to cry.

  Either his hangover was gone or the outside world now conformed so exactly to the symptoms that his sense of radical disconnection had evaporated and he was back in tune with things. There was no passenger list in the Times. Eerily certain that he would know someone who had died, he went upstairs, coffee in hand, to search the Internet for more recent news, pausing on the landing to hear Chick, timing his hammer-blows to a band of yelling banshees on the radio.

  An e-mail from Miriam Glazebrook had appeared in his Inbox.

  Tom,

  Thank you for “Aliens.” It’s timely, eloquent, and funny—and I see no problem with length. Unfortunately, the consensus here is that in the light of your present situation in Seattle we can’t broadcast it immediately. As you will know, KUOW is running a pledge drive later in the month, and the station is understandably anxious not to rouse irrelevant controversy among listeners. It would of course be impractical to broadcast the piece on ATC with our Seattle and Tacoma member-stations opting out. However, as soon as the situation changes, I’ll arrange a recording date with you. It’s a fine piece!