Checker and the Derailleurs

by Lionel Shriver

  She faltered. “And maybe I’m the man in the moon,” Syria returned, but a little late.

  He smiled again. “Maybe.”

  “You’re getting uppity.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, that’s kinda the idea. You think that’s what you want, but you’ll be surprised. I don’t think you’ll like it much at all. You loved pushing Hijack around. You can’t do that with me. I’m an American.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Yeah. And stop condescending. It’s not my fault I’m nineteen.”

  “All right,” said Syria, rolling up her sleeves. “I won’t humor you. This is middle-class adolescent histrionic crap. Why be a glutton for suffering? It arrives in the mail! Murder, diseases, nuclear war. Plenty guys would throw you off that cable, for ten dollars or for kicks.”

  “One thing I like about you is your cheerful perspective, Syr.”

  “No, but I like yours. Clearly I can use it.” She looked at her watch. “Listen, we’ve got to get down the hall and convince those doctors you’re ponderously sane.”

  “Am I?”

  “Maybe you should forgo sanity for charm. It’s actually a more attractive quality.”

  She helped him loop the feeding tube around its stand, and together they walked down the hall wheeling the IV behind them, like a pet. She held his arm, and the IV went squeegy-squeegy.

  “One of my students is a diver, and I told him about your adventure on the bridge. He asked me when the funeral was. I told him you made it without even a broken bone. He said that was incredible. He said even for a skilled diver that was high. I laughed. I told him you were good at things. Because you did it right, didn’t you? You couldn’t help yourself, you wanker, you do everything well. And you had a wonderful time on the way down, isn’t that what you were trying to tell me? I think you survived because you enjoyed it.”

  “Does it ever occur to you I’m only nineteen? What I’ll be like in a few years? Ever make you nervous?”

  “Sure. I like being nervous. But you haven’t seen me yet at forty-five.”

  Now that was a threat.

  Howard has a nickname

  25 / Spirits in the Material World

  As Drs. Finding and Spritzer paged despairingly through Checker’s voluminous file, Checker remarked, “Kind of like Friday the 13th, huh? Too many sequels.”

  Spritzer shot him a grim smile, determined to get to serious business, but Checker was learning he could play people like drums, and this was a pretty solo. He mocked his past failures in a comic refrain, threw in a few incisive accents of self-perception, a riff of elegant irony, even a beat or two of silent emotional reflection. He colored the performance with a careful balance of regret and onward-ho. He led Finding into a long cadenza about how hard it must be for a psychiatrist to help a patient he dislikes. Spritzer followed progressive rock, and wondered what Checker thought of The Queen Is Dead. They moved their chairs closer to the drummer. Checker smoked another cigarette.

  Syria kept putting her hand over on Checker’s thigh and remembering she was his mother and taking it back again. They asked her about Checker’s childhood, and Syria expounded fluently. He’d had depressive episodes as a kid, she said. But the rest of the time he was amazing. He’d set up pots and pans all over the kitchen and play them with serving spoons and spatulas. Cookie canisters with paper clips for a snare…

  The doctors canceled their next appointments. Still, they ran overtime. Finally they looked at their watches with evident regret and closed Checker’s chart.

  “I don’t think we have to—” said Finding.

  “No, you really do seem pretty—” said Spritzer.

  “If we could see you once a week, I think—”

  “Twice,” said the younger man. “Considering the severity—”

  “Twice, then,” Finding agreed. “In fact, I personally would be happy to—”

  “Oh no,” said Spritzer. “Your caseload is so heavy, Dr. Finding, I really should take Mr. Secretti’s—”

  “We’ll discuss this later,” said Finding severely.

  “I’m doing a study that Secretti would fit so—”

  As the foursome lingered in the hall, Howard Williams stormed toward them in his new dark glasses. He paced beside the group, clicking his mechanical pencil against the clasp of his clipboard, making a note or two, humming, tapping his new pointy leather shoes, a luminous fuchsia.

  “You spring the kid?” Howard asked Syria tersely once the doctors had pumped Checker’s hand and argued off down the hall.

  “Looks like it,” said Syria.

  “Address that matter we discussed?”

  “Not yet, so go ahead.”

  “I’ve been talking myself blue in the face for two years and he doesn’t listen to me. You said you would—” Howard stamped his foot. “You said—”

  “Could I please get my jeans on?” Check intervened. “My ass is hanging out of this gown.”

  Checker stood outside Astoria General smoothing down the nap of his jeans, now purged of river water and exuding the severe, punitive smell of hospital laundry. They’d thrown out his T-shirt; Checker rolled up the sleeves of the new red flannel Syria had maternally brought him, thinking if he wanted a wife instead of a parent it was going to be a fight. Probably the easiest way to get her off his back would be to get her pregnant.

  “Why are you smiling?” asked Syria.

  “Nothing. It just—feels good here.”

  It was Labor Day. Traffic was light. The first wisps of cooler fall air trailed through his breath. Late afternoon, sixish—he didn’t know, since he’d ruined his watch in the dive. Checker twisted the big leather cuff. Howard had laced it up too loose, and now it hung down on his hand so that the tops of the scars showed.

  “So how about a little dinner action?” Howard proposed, taking charge.

  “The Neptune?”

  “No, somewhere decent. I say the Charcoal Grill.”

  “That isn’t hamburgers, Howard. I’ve heard it’s like twenty plus, no frills.”

  “On me,” Howard dismissed. “Tax deductible.”

  Unprepossessing as it might sound, the Charcoal Grill is Astoria’s poshest restaurant—Italian, a little garish with the fountain in front, but the waiters pad between tables hush-hush—taking orders in whispers with little bows—more of the neighborhood’s characteristic innocent pretension. Howard fit right in—demanding lobsters all around, and a Beaujolais Villages that he pronounced like the name of a condominium development. He kept his sunglasses on, and slipped his mechanical pencil behind his ear.

  “Howard, this is going to cost—”

  “Ah, listen,” said Howard, taking the pencil back out and chewing on the eraser with deliberation. “Since that incident the other day? We’re canning the ‘Howard.’”

  “How, we’ve been through this name thing—”

  “Uh-uh. No ‘How,’ even.”

  “So what is it this time?”

  “Sidestroke,” Howard muttered shyly.

  “Did you come up with that—?”

  “No,” Howard whispered. “Sweets did.”

  “No kidding.”

  “No kidding.”

  “Pretty decent of the guy.”

  “Well, it just sort of—came about, you know. And it’s sticking. I know it’s your stroke, though, if that bothers you I—”

  “No, take it. Howard!” Checker exclaimed proudly.

  “Sh-sh!”

  “I mean, Sidestroke, you sly dog, you got a nickname.”

  “Yeah.” Howard glanced away, readjusting his glasses and clearing his throat. “Anyway,” he tried to continue, through Checker’s laughing and beaming. “We’ve got a proposition.”

  Officiously Howard laid out the record company’s offer while they slurped down their oysters on the half shell and Checker went through three baskets of Italian bread. (He was starving. Glucose just didn’t cut it after a while.) “They’ve been trying to get you all week,” he explained. “I
decided it wasn’t in our best interests to say, Well, guys, do they have twenty-four track at Bellevue? So they think you’re holding out, that you’ve got other offers. I’ve gotten them to triple their original bid, but I don’t think they’ll go much higher. I think we should take it.”

  “You’ve got a knack for this, Sidestroke,” said Syria.

  Checker kneaded his forehead. “I’ve told you over and over—”

  “All right, Pyramus,” said Howard. “Hit it.”

  Checker turned with a groan to Syria, who shot him a sweet warning smile.

  “I’m happy in Plato’s—”

  “Don’t make me laugh.”

  He made himself laugh. “You can’t do the right things for the wrong reasons—”

  “I’m confused,” said Syria flat out.

  “I don’t want to please a bunch of midtown executives.”

  “Too late, you already have. Besides…” she added slyly, twirling a feeler.

  “What?”

  “It would be fun.”

  Checker looked as if someone had hit him in the head.

  “There’s a big world out there,” she went on. “Play with it.”

  Something clicked. It was as if someone had opened the gate by the swing set and let down the fences around the kickball field and suddenly, instead of the playground dissolving, it took over everything outside. Checker felt the presence of Manhattan behind this restaurant tingle up the back of his neck. The skyline teased him. Here, look, it said. You’ve learned to like oysters? I am your oyster. Both shiny World Trade Towers baubles for your amusement. And plate glass? I’ll show you plate glass. You are the protector of the fragile and the beautiful, so I will trust you with miles of tinted windows and dozens of quaint corner bars with proprietors who will stand you drinks when they recognize your face from videos. Did you know in the lobby of IBM there are whole bamboo trees? Climb them. Ride my elevators up and down. Take my helicopters and land on the roofs of buildings. Don’t be afraid. I take only what you offer, but I want what you have. There are grown-ups in penthouses here who could use a good laugh. Sit them down and play your latest riffs with well-weighted silverware on the shining obsidian of the bright bar, and I will order you a mimosa. Feel the plush salmon pile of the upholstery tickle your fingertips hair by hair.

  Hello, Checker kept thinking. Hello, hello. We’ve never talked before. We have a lot to discuss. Checker felt as if he were making an appointment. How does Friday sound to you? So he let Syria and Howard continue, and enjoyed their convincing him. “Go on,” he said, cracking a lobster claw and dipping it in the drawn butter. “Do it.”

  “You said recording was the best thing that’s happened in a hundred years,” said Howard. “Better than the airplane, you said. And radio? You can’t believe it’s free, you said. You’d pay, you said. You sent Danno a dollar once, remember?”

  Syria asked him as if reading an oath, swearing him in, “Do you love rock and roll?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you love your own songs?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you glad that musicians you admire are widely available for $5.99?”

  “$6.99,” said Howard.

  “$7.99,” said Checker. “But a bargain.”

  “I rest my case.”

  “You rest jackshit,” said Check. “Do you love glass?”

  She didn’t respond.

  “Do you love your own work? Because that room in the back of Vesuvius is beginning to look like a crystal concentration camp. Are you planning to teach people to ‘center their piece’ and ‘flash the punty’ and do production goblets for the rest of your life?”

  Syria worked the meat from a lobster leg meditatively with her teeth. “Howard, we’ve created a monster.”

  “You get yourself a gallery or I stay in Plato’s until my arteries harden into lead pipes.”

  “I don’t care what anyone thinks of my bones,” said Syria. “They’re none of your business.”

  “They are now.”

  It was something between an agreement and an impasse. That’s the way it would always be with them, too: perfect loggerheads. They would take turns being irresistible force and immovable object.

  Howard was not clear on what had just happened, but it was time to get to Plato’s for The Derailleurs’ private party, and he desperately needed rescuing from this lobster. The crustacean lay in a crumple of meat and shell, less like an animal he’d eaten than one he’d run over.

  Outside the Charcoal Grill, Checker was suddenly reminded that he had no bicycle. A strange feeling—bad, of course. Yet it’s a relief to be delivered of anything. He didn’t have to worry about grease, or if someone had stolen her seat. One of the horrors of all deaths is how nice they are, really. No more responsibility—for your plants, your dog, your mother.

  As they approached Plato’s, Checker had to remind himself he’d been here last week, for he felt like a visitor years later; he half expected a different paint job and new management. Maybe they’d finally put in a row of blinking lights along the perimeter of the bar and veneered over CS + LS with plastic laminate. The waitress would be courteous but inattentive. They’d look around Plato’s (Chumpy’s now? Barky’s. Socrates’), quietly sipping the new brand on draught, paler and cheaper than the old Bass ale. There’d be a poster on the door advertising a new band, The Eviscerators, though no one would be playing yet; the three of them were all so very much older that they came to nightclubs at eight o’clock and went to bed before the band began. Checker, he upbraided himself, you sound like Caldwell. Whatever happened to him?

  Yet when Checker walked in and the knotty-pine paneling remained, the initials still polyurethaned into his favorite table, and the familiar band members around it not noticeably older than one week, this quality of visitation did nothing but increase. And it was not Caldwell’s nostalgia, either, for he did not feel a harking backward. Checker walked to his friends with a steady finality that was neither happy nor sad. It was one of the most interesting moments of his life.

  The band, too, felt the amount of time that had passed, for calendars lie; real time is not mathematical at all. While we can leap decades like brooks, some of us will spend the rest of eternity slogging our way through a particular five minutes. That they had only been rehearsing for the Astoria Park concert ten days before was an uninteresting technicality, and they had to resist reminding each other, Remember, we used to play together, back then.

  Checker stepped into the candlelight, his face flickering like the image of someone whose likeness you cannot quite recall. He kept looking familiar, then not, distorting and fading as the flame bent from the draft of the door. The circle tensed. They gripped each other’s hands as if in a séance where they had inadvertently conjured a spirit when no one really believed in ghosts.

  Caldwell deliberately broke the spell by leaving for the men’s room, to return, coasting, braking at the toe of Checker’s sneaker. “It’s your suicide present.”

  As Checker stroked the frame it shimmered and twitched like the withers of a horse. The finish tingled, a quick metallic blue. He lifted the entire machine with one forefinger. Light.

  “Campagnolo, top to bottom,” said Caldwell.

  Checker spun the pedals, and their bearings sang like a well-rehearsed choir. The brakes grabbed at a touch and leaped back at release. The bike seemed to have a hard time standing still. It didn’t like being inside. A racer. High-strung, nervous, recklessly wild for speed. Something you went places on.

  But it was young and new, and they were strangers. Without history, it would stream down the street because it hadn’t learned yet what happened when you hit a metal plate at thirty-five. A kind of stupidity, actually. Blankly cooperative, it would sweep underneath him, but it would do that for anyone. It had not learned loyalty, or its price. A few accidents down the road and they’d understand each other better, he supposed.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Caldwell.

  �
�Sorry,” said Checker. “I mean, thanks. It’s not Zefal, that’s all.”

  “Yeah, well,” said Caldwell. “You can’t have Zefal, right? So you just tool up to the next one. Who knows, maybe tomorrow you’ll take this blue sucker and roll it under a fat M-5. Then you get a black one or a red one or a motorcycle, right? You just keep the program moving.”

  Somewhere in there Checker recognized his own philosophy; what he didn’t recognize was Caldwell saying it. Or Rachel confirming it. Or the two of them holding hands.

  “Exacta,” said Checker.

  “What say?”

  “His name. Exacta.”

  Everyone was relieved. For Checker to name something was to accept it. “He this time?” asked Caldwell.

  “Zefal always made my girlfriends jealous.” Checker smiled. “If they had any sense. But I’ve got better ways to keep a wife on her toes.”

  “Sheckair,” asked Rahim heavily, “make wife?”

  “That’s right,” said Checker. “You can keep the country, Hijack. But I don’t think you get the girl.”

  Checker wheeled around the nightclub, the click of the freewheel sharp, Exacta tugging underneath, Checker sternly keeping him from careening into chairs. When he rode past the stage, Check came up so short he was thrown off the seat. He dismounted and put down the kickstand. “Where are my drums?”

  “It’s got a cyclometer, too—” Caldwell pointed at the handlebars. “Digital. Four different functions—”

  “Sweets. The drums.”

  Caldwell pressed the “mode” button on the cyclometer—one, two, three, four—and breathed. “They’re gone.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Checker, without any noticeable horror. “Where?”