by David Shafer
Alka approached him. She was a little Indian girl, all eyelashes and shoelaces. “Are you okay, Leo?” she asked.
“Yeah, I’m okay, Alka,” he said. Then, because she was a child and would not call him crazy for saying it, he added, “But I think that they just tried to kill me.”
“You should be careful,” said Alka.
“Mos’ def, Alka. We should all be careful.”
It was probably due to his disembodied—or, rather, too keenly embodied—state that Leo was unaware of Sharon, who had come up behind him.
“Can I speak to you inside, Leo,” said Sharon.
“They tried to kill Leo,” said Alka.
“No, that was just a joke, Alka,” said Sharon. “Leo was joking. Why don’t you go and play with Cecilie.” Sharon was in a purple pantsuit. Alka, all of five, heard the edge in Sharon’s voice and shoved off. “Leo. Inside. Right now,” said Sharon.
Every successful person knows that he’s supposed to have a story about having been fired. But if one is telling such a story, it is presumed that the teller has overcome the embarrassment of the event and is telling it beneath the smiling light of a vindicating future. However, Leo had been fired from, or failed at, a few jobs now, so the walk from the outdoor play zone to Sharon’s front office was a long one indeed, especially because his feet seemed to lag in their response to his brain’s commands, which meant that he was staggering.
The other play facilitators weren’t looking at him. Or maybe they were just engaged with those children who stayed in a mild posttraumatic state for twenty minutes after drop-off, the ones you really had to look after. Samuel was not one of those children. Samuel, a stoic riddle of a child who happily did blockwork while classmates shrieked murderously beside him and who would probably soon receive a distinguishing diagnosis, had dropped his gluestick and was beelining toward Leo.
“Hold on there, Samuel,” said Leo to the boy as he approached. But Samuel ignored him and flung himself at Leo, open-armed. Leo picked him up and held him strongly, though in doing so, he noticed, painfully, his torqued spine. So, gently, he put Samuel down. Sharon was standing at the open door to her office. Leo trudged in.
Sharon’s office was full of beanbag frogs; she thought frogs were winning and childlike. She gestured for Leo to sit, and then she sat too, among her frogs, and put her arms on her desk.
“Leo, I think we both know why you’re here,” she said.
Yeah, but he wasn’t going to help her do this. “Promotion?” he said.
Her fingers were laced pudgily on her huge desk-blotter calendar. “You’ve gotten stranger and stranger these past few months, Leo. I’m afraid I just can’t have you responsible for these children. I am going to have to ask you to leave.”
“Ask me? Really?”
“No. Tell you. Okay? I’m telling you to leave. Let’s not make this unpleasant, Leo. Brand-New Day has no further need of your services.”
His face went hot and the small room got smaller, like someone had twisted the zoom lens on his vision. He felt like a child. Tears—oh hell, not tears—came to his eyes. He was going to lose something dear to him. The mayhem of cleaning up after crafts, the riot of Rolling Death, the quiet of nap. The children. They didn’t care what a hash he’d made of the past ten years. They were joy uncorrupted, bad liars, openhearted. They were his fan base, his gorgeous, dirty rabble. They loved him.
“But who will write the daily journal sheets?” he tried to say but squeaked instead, the words rushing, high-pitched, to beat out the sob rising behind them.
“I want you to leave the building when you leave this room, Leo. Do you understand?” she said.
Leo tried to collect himself. He paid close attention to his breath. He set his mouth, looked at his hands. Then something strange happened: anger began to eclipse the pain and confusion.
“You’ll have to pay me to leave, right? You can’t just fire me like this?”
“I think if you look at your contract, you’ll find that we owe you two weeks’ pay.”
His contract? He had forgotten he had one of these. “Okay. I’ll take that now.”
Sharon looked at him as blankly as one of her frogs.
“I mean right now. You got nine hundred and sixty bucks in that desk?”
“Of course not. I’ll have Linda send you a check.”
I’ll have Linda send you a check. And just like that, Brand-New Day would be done with him. Oh, it made his blood boil; it made him light-headed. So few people could give these children the kind of care he’d been giving them. He was sure of that. Never lying to them; engaging them with all he had. I’ll have Linda send you a check. He wanted to rifle through Sharon’s desk drawers, her purse. He wanted to take whatever money she had, kick her in the pantsuit. He wanted to break her stupid fat fingers, scatter her zillion folders, command the fours-and-fives to set on her like jackals. Uh-oh. He had mumbled some of that aloud.
Behind the rage was another feeling: a keen pleasure at feeling enraged. He tried to hold on to the rage and the pleasure at the rage, because beyond these was a deep lake of sadness at the fact that he had just lost a job he loved, that he would not see these children again, that tomorrow the hours would yawn in front of him. Others would go to work and he’d have to pick his way across the moody rubble of the day. Plus, he didn’t have any breathing room in his budget. He spent every cent that came his way. And the last time his sisters had given him money, they’d made it pretty clear that they were tired of bailing him out.
He stood up too quickly, and the chair he had been sitting in tipped back and fell over. Sharon jumped in her seat. Leo enjoyed her discomfort. Was she actually afraid of him? Good. Let her be. Puffed with anger and gutted with grief, he opened Sharon’s office door to leave.
“I don’t want you upsetting the children, Leo,” Sharon said to his back. “You understand? I just want you to leave now. Don’t worry about the take-home notes. I can write those.”
Sharon would write the daily journal sheets? She’d fuck up a shopping list. His hand found a beanbag frog. He turned and hucked it at her. The frog whizzed through the close air of the office. It thunked squarely into Sharon’s eye and landed flat on her desk.
They were both shocked. Only the thrown frog was unfazed. It was still smiling the way frogs certainly do not smile. Then that moment broke, and Leo, proud of the first violent act of his adult life, skedaddled.
“That’s assault! You assaulted me, you little prick,” Sharon yelled after him. She was picking up her phone.
But he was moving now. Toward the exit. He stopped to face the big room once. The grown-ups were brittle, the children oblivious. He raised a clenched fist high. “Give ’em hell,” he shouted.
At the far end of the room, Samuel raised his small fist in return.
Chapter 3
New York City
Right this way, Mr. Deveraux.”
The assistant led Mark down low-ceilinged corridors to a greenroom and held the door open without entering himself. Mark peered in. Leather couches; an expansive array of granola bars and iced bottles of juice and water and bagels and tea bags in foil envelopes; Margo! magazines on a hyperabundance of end tables; an attractive man stirring coffee daintily and looking engrossed in the sheaf of papers before him. Mark didn’t enter the room either.
“Yeah, listen,” he said to the PA, “I believe that my representative told the person that she liaised with here that I would be needing a private room to prepare? With a window? For meditational purposes? Do you think you could see about that?”
The PA nodded slowly and blinked twice. He looked at his clipboard. “Ah, sure.” He exhaled. The microphone part of the headset he wore looked like a big fat fly hovering before his mouth. “Would you like to wait in there and I’ll see about that?”
“That’s okay. I’ll wait right here.” Mark watched the PA retreat and he considered the possibility that he would have to go on TV in his current too-sober state. Other tha
n this potential crimp, though, everything was pretty much as he had hoped it would be: the black car sent for him; the attractive assistant who sat primly in the backseat with him (she wore a gray skirt and a pristine mountaineering parka that kept Mark from scoping her northern hemisphere, and she worked the thumb wheel on her BlackBerry as though it were a rosary); the way that, once he got to the studio, there was a sort of event horizon that preceded him by fifty yards within which everyone appeared to be aware of him and of who he was.
He realized that he recognized the good-looking man in the greenroom—a celebrity chef who claimed his name was Nicholas Rugby. Mark had received a copy of his book from three different people last Christmas. It was called Eat for the Real You and featured shallow-depth-of-field photography of noodles, and breezy instructions rich in kinetic verbs. He could go in there now and introduce himself and they’d probably both pretend to respect each other’s work and maybe become celebrity friends and Mark could have Nicholas to dinner and Nicholas could make his famous noodles, famously, in the open-plan kitchen Mark was going to install in the apartment he’d just bought in Brooklyn. But no—Mark was getting more nervous by the moment. Maybe after the taping there’d be time for that. He would wait in the hallway now, wait to be shown the private room that these days was his due.
In the year or so since he had begun his steep ascent through the strata of this particular type of fame, Mark had found that those charged with his comfort actually liked him to express specific wishes. A seat number less than ten and on the right side of the airplane. A lectern no taller than forty inches. Idiosyncrasies were also appreciated. He kept about ten pens on his person and had notepads jammed into every pocket. The jamming-in part was important. Mark pre-rumpled the notepads—bent the cardboard backing and curled the pages—so that when he pulled out a pad, it looked positively fizzling with ideas. Marjorie Blinc, his cunning consigliera, encouraged the behavior, especially the pre-appearance requests. “Don’t be a jerk about it, but be firm,” she said. “Let me be a jerk about it.” There were a few stipulations she had written into his standard contract that Mark had balked at: lemon rounds, not wedges; hypoallergenic makeup; fair-trade green tea. These, she explained, were gives—items that he was not to insist upon, which lack of insistence would make him seem like a much more reasonable person than his contract made him out to be.
“If it comes up, go ahead and say you had no idea that the agency wrote lemon rounds into your contract,” she told him, “and that you find such a requirement ridiculous.” At first, these machinations had embarrassed him. Then he saw how well they worked. And soon he ceased to think of them as machinations. The fact that he accepted, graciously, either a lemon wedge or a lemon round in his sparkling water he took as evidence of his own lack of attachment. He knew that there were people who actually did care about such things; he was not one of them.
But this need to be alone in a room with a window was not a give. In a few minutes he would be talking to ten million people. Come off well here, and his name and work would bloom like ink in water. There were people waiting around to see if the success of his book was repeatable, if his philosophy was scalable. Blinc’s agency had already gotten him more money than his mother had spent on his upbringing. But Mark was no fool. Someone else would come along with something new and knock the charm right off him. Before the magazine-reading classes tired of him, he needed to leverage his fluke fame into something more bankable. He needed to pluck from this tempest the idea he still believed in and carry it to safety. Do that, and he wouldn’t need Marjorie Blinc or her squads of editors and forecasters. He wouldn’t need the craven SineCo squillionaire James Straw, whose early devotion to Mark’s book—he’d decreed that it should serve as management doctrine for his tech empire and bought a copy for every one of his employees—was the reason that Mark now had an agent and publicists and an accountant and (ever since he’d begun to receive scrawl-penned letters from one particularly enthusiastic and unhinged fan) a security consultant.
Gray Skirt was coming toward him now at a brisk clip. Her boots made a tack-tack sound that preceded her.
“Is there a problem with the greenroom?” she asked, appearing to care.
“Oh, no. No problem. It’s just that I’ll need a few minutes of solitude before I go on. To meditate. To get centered. A room with a window, if at all possible.”
“I think we can accommodate you,” said Gray Skirt, smiling in a tight-lipped way.
Yes, I think you can too, thought Mark, giddy with the sense, as he was so often these days, that the world would and could accommodate him. Was it zero-sum? A pretty girl was going to lead him to a private room in a TV studio; did that mean that someone else, somewhere else, was not receiving such treatment? He thought not. Although there were probably not enough private jets for everyone. Mark had now spent tens of hours aloft in a few of these—he had slept on a couch in a tube going five hundred miles an hour high above the blue earth. But for that matter, even being able to fly coach represents an unearned economic advantage, doesn’t it? Or, hell, just driving a car. Who among us deserves all he has? Mark recognized that there was hypocrisy at the center of his current life (“A young wise man without pretensions,” Time magazine had called him, although last week, he had been hunting wild boar, drunk, on Straw’s Carmel ranch), but he was doing nothing more than asking for the things he wanted. Which was what his book, Bringing the Inside Out, had turned out to be about. Still, when he remarked to Gray Skirt that the studio was a bit nippy, he did this by way of flirtation, not in anticipation of being handed a cashmere sweater from a closet stocked with them.
“Here, take a Margo! sweater, courtesy of Margo,” said Gray Skirt. “Margo keeps the studio at this temperature to boost alertness. It was one of many changes she made around here after she read your book.”
Was she fucking with him? Mark wondered. If not, then he was dealing with a real fawn, which was exciting. He scanned her again for any obvious defects that might have escaped his initial survey. Somewhere between black car and chill studio, she had swapped her extreme parka for a sort of power shawl, which was somewhat more revealing. She had pretty, coltish shoulders and thick black hair. But still. She might very well be fucking with him. There was a lack of feeling in the way she deferred to him, although that could have been due to the fact that she was Margo’s third—or maybe even second—lieutenant, and therefore more powerful and important than he was. If she was only chafing at the task assigned to her, that would be fine. He could probably win her over by acting as if he didn’t care that she outranked him. But he wished to eliminate the possibility that she was one of the—it must be many—people who believed that his book was totally fatuous. Did she know that he could not now recall how he had arrived at any of his so-called consciousclusions; had no idea, really, what the word was meant to mean? Ditto flowtachment. Did she know that, after he and his eight agency-supplied editors had been over the copy hundreds of times in the four weeks it took to produce the manuscript, Mark could not see in the book’s anodyne, aphoristic nonsense any of the ideas that had made “Motivation in an Unjust World” a good essay?
“Motivation in an Unjust World” was the essay Mark had written two years ago. The gist of it had been wrung from him in a single night, at his kitchen table, on an IBM Selectric, which hummed like a generator on a ship. Bombed on OxyContin and Pouilly-Fuissé chardonnay (and Riesling, when the chardonnay had gone), he had written ten pages without getting up. They were confused and chaotic, but there was a bright strand of logic running between the paragraphs, which drew a reader through the whole thing.
Or would, Mark felt sure the next morning, if he could just flatten out a few of the steeper arcs between ideas and find a way to avoid sounding so strident there at the end; in fact, do away with any whiff of strident and replace it with the detached tone he had somehow managed in the first third.
He set about the rewrite that day, after a cigarette and a walk around the
block, and at the same kitchen table, stinging coffee and buttered toast in the a.m., slick Guinness and buttered toast in the p.m. By the next day he had ten thousand words on how a person—no, how Mark, how he himself should arrive at right decisions. Kant was in there. Elie Wiesel was in there, and Hannah Arendt and John Rawls. James Baldwin and Walker Percy were in there too. The trick was to stay hammered enough to write courageously but sober enough to see the screen and avoid porn. The trick was to write for an audience of one. I will not be rewarded for acting honorably, he stressed in the essay. Rewards come from without, and what is given to me is never really mine. Even my breath is borrowed.
The points he made were like lily pads on the surface of a lake—the monstrous lily pads he had seen once in a Florida swamp. You wouldn’t want to get too comfortable on those, but you could maybe alight on one briefly and move on to the next.
It was pretty basic stuff about how you’re never going to be certain, and there are too many variables to control for, and that probably the work of life is all about balancing, which is a task that never really gets any easier, so the most you can ever hope to do is be kind and be careful, and trying to be those things actually, literally, turns out to be its own reward. But he managed to hit just the right notes. Nothing had ever come to him like this before. Writing it, he felt the weight of self lessen and saw the gates of truth swing open. Even the scrape of the chair legs across the vinyl floor told him to keep writing.
Or was that the crushed-up Ritalin? The slush of ethyl alcohol in the alleys and boulevards of his brain? His roommate had left for the summer; his girlfriend had left him two months ago. The people he knew were getting married, getting better jobs, getting out of the kind of housing you find by pulling tabs off signs in laundromats. He had few friends at work, because work was a biotech company for which he wrote press releases and annual-report copy, and it was made up mainly of hyperintelligent Indians and hypergreedy non-Indians, very few of whom wanted to start drinking directly after work in the Plough and Stars as Mark wanted to do, desperately and daily. So he was alone in those days and had no one to check his slide into the fog and no one, as it happened, to read what he wrote. When he pulled up at the close of a particularly breathless paragraph (…because there are judges. Somewhere. In your particular heavens, in your beating heart. In the knife you drag across the toast, in the hands you lay on others. Judging and being judged at once, we cancel ourselves out, as in sleep, and in that hush is our salvation. At our best, we solve for x, and x = 0), it occurred to him that he might be writing nonsense. So he took a walk around the jagged June of Somerville, past the Virgin Marys in their half-buried-upright-bathtub shrines, past the old Portuguese ladies who, scarved and scowling, pushed squeaky carts around the neighborhood. Another cigarette and then a cup of coffee squirted from the machine in the Kwik-Mart on the corner. And, for later, a couple of Budweiser tall boys and an ice cream bar from the cases beside the coffee-squirting machine, and then he waited at the counter behind the old man who fat-fingered quarters from his swollen palm for two scratch tickets and a pack of Old Golds. And then he went home, climbed the two flights of sagging wooden stairs, and played a CD too loud for two p.m. as he lay on his sprung couch, in and out of a reverie.
