Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

by David Shafer

  Could he write them both? This Ten Steps shit and Try Again Tomorrow? The latter for later publication, as a non-bullshit companion work, a shadow volume, an apostasy? With it, he would rescue his reputation, reclaim the place that “Motivation in an Unjust World” had briefly let him hold. He would tell the truth about life: that you have to stop thinking that you’re the able captain of a ship called You, with a wheel, or a rudder, or a tiller, or whatever. You have to realize that you are instead a leaf in a stream. And he would tell the truth about himself: that he was a vain, depressive, selfish drug addict who had become, by accident, a briefly, wildly successful self-help author. That alone was interesting. He just had to be honest about it.

  But how honest was always the question, wasn’t it? No one likes an oversharer. And such a book would most likely be contrary to Blinc’s plan. Blinc was not someone you wanted to piss off unless you were very sure of your position. If he got Straw really on his side, though, he could probably risk crossing Blinc.

  Oh Christ—there is no way a man can write when he is this wound up. Mark stood and did a quick, nervous circuit of the fancy flat, as if the walk would do him any good. SineCo used this flat for short-term executive tenancy. It was furnished in sterile posh. The books on the shelves were set dressing; the food in the kitchen was delivered once a week. What was Mark’s he’d brought in two duffels. So it was an addict’s conceit to pretend he didn’t know what he was looking for.

  Mark would have preferred pot to hash. But he didn’t know anyone in London and had to score his drugs by seedier means than he was accustomed to, and from a more limited menu. On the black granite countertops of the kitchen, he went through the tedious process of rolling a few hash-laced cigarettes. It was ten o’clock in the morning.

  The situation was definitely worrying. It wasn’t just the Blinc problem. If it were just that, he could at least imagine some post-Blinc situation. But was he even a writer at all? Not long ago, he had been so sure of it.

  He certainly felt like a writer. He dressed and comported himself in a way that he thought writerly. And in his own swirling dome, he could still do a good job of putting abstract ideas into words. And he was willing to say what others thought it was risky or impolite to say. So, no, his wasn’t an idle, druggie sort of drug use. It was a means to a desperately needed end.

  The problem was, though, that these days, when he felt he needed to write, when he felt like he was getting a handle on an idea, it turned out he just wanted to drink or smoke or get fucked up, alone. The pen would lie limp in his hand, the typewriter would hum patiently, the cursor would blip accusingly, and he’d set upon the alcohol in the minibar or the pantry or he’d find a dark bar on a bright street.

  And something was changing in his drinking. The lucid, potentially productive patch was shrinking to minutes, and the descent into the slur and fug of drunk was becoming steeper. A month ago, he’d made a few phone calls he could not remember making. That was—for forty-eight hours—a sobering experience. Since that night, he had had to put in place certain rules limiting interaction with nonstrangers after six p.m. Because by that time he was almost certainly stoned and drunk and casting off to drift alone in a sea of memories and impressions, hoping to return to shore with something useful. But lately what he found flopping at the bottom of the dinghy in the morning was too small to keep.

  Mark didn’t mind being the kind of alcoholic with a lot on his mind, the kind who maybe fumbles with his keys. But that self-abduction shit—where you take leave of yourself, and a ghoul takes over instead, and the night comes back at you the next day, memories like shredded documents; the gut wrench of wanting to know exactly what you did and not wanting to know at all—that was the kind of alcoholic he minded being. And once he’d become a recognizable low-order celebrity, the damage that an unsecret blackout drunk might do to his career…the thought made him sweat.

  So he forced that kind of behavior into submission by hating himself incandescently for days after those drunks transpired. And it worked. He had not self-abducted for a while now. If he felt it coming on, he taped a sheet of paper to the inside of his door with a command in Sharpie: Don’t. So he had been able to forget about his ghoul, to think of him as a tormentor from an earlier time, like a bully from the eighth grade. When a zillionaire actor was caught on cameraphone drooling racial slurs, Mark joined in tsking and glee, though in his secret heart, he felt for the poor bastard.

  The thing was, there was some overlap in the behavior patterns of the productive artist and the self-aware addict. That was problematic. Or anyway, it contributed to Mark’s confusion: Was he a serious writer or a freakishly lucky drunk pillhead? There was a lot riding on the answer.

  He left the flat to smoke, bringing his laptop with him. This was a good idea. Who could work in that strange, silent apartment? It was a beautiful day outside, people charging all around.

  The spliff did indeed get things going again. Though there was a syrupy quality to the hash high that he didn’t like, a gumming-up, like ten thoughts were happily walking along but then suddenly had to squeeze through a narrow gate. He was almost run down by one of those black cabs, coming as they do like Valkyries, and from the wrong direction. That got his heart pumping.

  Mark loved London. In the two months he’d been here—trying to write, not writing, drinking alone, and attending almost daily to the needs and ego of his patron Straw—Mark had crisscrossed the place heavily. He liked to go on long, ale-smeared journeys across its broad gut, as unbusy as an indigent. Today, though, he was going to stay on task: find another coffee, maybe a muffin, and then a quiet place to write.

  He was outside some sort of toy museum near Bethnal Green. Intriguing. It wasn’t really quiet, but there was a café.

  He started treating his hangover with careful, holistic self-retoxifying—drinking a string of bitter coffees and ducking out for cigarettes and then another spliff. After a while, he felt okay enough for a chicken salad sandwich and a couple of minibottles of white wine. And he was writing. As his mood improved, he thought he might see a way to write the book Blinc wanted. There were rules to life, certainly. Or probably. And there was nothing wrong with trying to divine them.

  After every five hundred words he’d take a wander, past a taxonomy of wooden yo-yos and cases displaying examples of something called toy theater, which was apparently big in the nineteenth century. Then he’d write another five hundred words and then return to an artifact that had caught his eye, like the Victorian board game for children called Virtue Rewarded and Vice Punished.

  Remember what it was like when you were a child was his starting point, and pretty soon he’d cranked out a thousand words. It’s not that children were innocent, obviously (he had just seen one boy in the café find the tipping point of his little sister’s stroller), but they poked at life scientifically. They analyzed data and drew conclusions; they started from scratch. After some point early in our lives, we forget to do that, thought Mark. So in a certain way, growing up was the opposite of the loss of innocence.

  He thought of the possessions he’d loved when he was little. There was a toy called Stretch Armstrong, a rubberized, Speedoed wrestler doll; you could stretch him to great lengths and he would reshape himself. But you could not stretch him as far as Mark had tried to stretch him once, with the aid of some clothesline and two cinder blocks. What a disappointment that was. Stretch turned out to be filled with some sort of lab-accident green goo.

  What else had he loved? His dog, his mom, and a doll named Sasha. Mark had loved Sasha in the way that little boys were not supposed to love dolls. Maybe it had something to do with the little sister who had been stillborn a few months before his father left. When people asked him if he was an only child, he said yes but he sometimes thought no.

  He had certainly become something of an only adult, though. What had happened to his friends? He had had friends. Back in college and for a few years after that—people who would have come over in the midd
le of the night; people to whom he would have gone in the middle of the night, and did. But in the museum, sitting there with a clutch of cool postcards from the gift shop, he realized that he had more postcards than friends to send them to. He could not now see where he had gone wrong. True, he’d tossed away a few girlfriends, each one at somewhere near the point when you have to step up or get gone. But that was, finally, out of consideration for them.

  “You don’t think you’re better off alone, do you?” his Lost Girlfriend had asked him once. He’d taken too long to answer that, and he’d seen her go cold.

  But aren’t you supposed to learn to take care of yourself? Isn’t that what his mother had showed him?

  And Leo Crane. What had happened there?

  They’d met in Harvard Yard, on a sharp autumn day at the end of the last millennium; their friendship grew quickly and easily. Mark loved Harvard, but he hadn’t really liked being waist-deep in rich kids, all the prep-school princes who’d taken taxis to their orthodontists or who thought they were Keith Richards because a doorman could get them coke. Leo could have been like that but wasn’t. They tumbled through college together—careless, confused, and intent. Leo needed someone who could talk fast and wouldn’t back down; Mark needed a bit of restraint.

  Leo, whose family was full of love and money but was also full of expectation, was jealous of Mark’s scrappier growing-up. Mark loved the Cranes for their erudition and for the array of guest rooms on offer in their gloomy Beaux Arts mansion on Riverside Drive. The Cranes probably hoped that some of Mark’s sharp charms would rub off on Leo, who had a habit of hanging back.

  Had he ever taken advantage of Leo? Mark thought not. He borrowed money a few times, but he’d paid back almost all of it. And anyway, anyone who knew the two of them in those years could have told you that Mark did more emotional heavy lifting for Leo than straight guys usually do for each other. Like when Leo’s mom and dad and the greyhounds perished in the fire. Or when it became apparent that Leo’s bookstore was doomed, and Leo’s sisters called Mark and asked him to go up to Rhinebeck to talk him down and out of it.

  But Mark and Leo had drifted apart in their thirties. This was more Mark’s doing than Leo’s—he’d just quit trying, let entropy and avoidance do their thing. He felt a bit shitty about that. But the same mental issues that had made Leo a cool, brooding undergraduate and an edgy twenty-five-year-old made him an annoying thirty-six-year-old was how it seemed to Mark. It was fine and valid to be a manic-depressive, but if you were also independently wealthy, that should be seen as a sort of karmic compensation; after a while, you shouldn’t really complain out loud.

  Plus there was the Leo-like character who had ended up in Bringing the Inside Out, which had probably given offense, of course. Mark hadn’t meant to leave him in there, but Blinc’s editors loved that chapter, and in the end Mark had brought that character forward. So he’d had to drop Leo once the book blew up. He actually dodged his calls, left e-mails from him unopened.

  Though, in a sense, he’d found Leo again.

  At a creative executive conference in Phoenix six months ago, Mark had run into a college friend who had asked him “Have you seen Leo Crane’s blog?” in a way that meant Dude, you have to see Leo Crane’s blog. And when Mark found the blog, he saw why. It was called I Have Shared a Document with You, and it was like watching a vase fall off a shelf. In places, Leo’s prose had that mad true thing in it, like when people write ill-advised letters right after they get dumped. But in other places, it was just embarrassing. Mark started lifting some of the mad true stuff for his radical-creativity seminars. He didn’t think it counted as plagiarism, exactly. Leo wasn’t even putting his name on his stuff, and the ideas in the blog posts were pretty much public domain–type ideas. Mark just used a few of Leo’s phrases. Like fears and desires. Leo was always going on about fears and desires in his batshit blog.

  In the café of the toy museum, Mark spent ten minutes trying to compose a postcard to Leo. His pen floated over the white rectangle. What could he possibly write?

  You would like this museum, he began. But no, that wasn’t what mattered.

  I’m sorry I put you in my stupid book? I’ve also been using some of your stuff in these seminars I give? Which are bullshit, by the way? I miss you? You sound crazy these days? We once had the world by the balls, you and I? I’m lonely? I’m in trouble? I’m lost, like you, but in a different way?

  No. It was too late for any of that. It seemed to Mark that all of life was either There’s still time or It’s too late. He tore up the postcard.

  He spent another hour poking paragraphs around the screen. But now he’d lost the thread he’d been pulling on. Who cares about what he remembered from his childhood? A teacher in high school once told him that until you can describe clearly what it is you mean, you don’t really mean it. That was the last great thing he had been taught in a classroom.

  It was time to make his way to Straw. He went back to the flat to clean up. Mark always tried to bring his A-game to these Straw sessions. Not that Straw really seemed to notice what Mark brought. And maybe A-game didn’t really describe what Mark brought. What Mark brought was a big, elaborate, flattering lie.

  Mark had been James Straw’s life coach for a year now. It was an easy arrangement: he was required only to find the man’s rambling soliloquies compelling, pretend to see meaning in them, then offer some not too transparent but not too opaque homily or parable that confirmed what Straw already thought. Straw treated these sessions as if they were genuine therapy and vented about the stresses of being hyperwealthy. Clearly, Straw had suggested Mark’s London sabbatical mainly because he, Straw, was going to be in London for a few months and didn’t want to be without access to Mark.

  And there was something going on other than life-coaching. After a session, Straw might take Mark to lunch or dinner at some private club or his Mayfair town house. They would cross London in Straw’s armored and motorcycle-escorted Bentley. Last week, after a session and a boozy lunch, Straw brought Mark to a shirtmaker on Jermyn Street where he ordered for Mark twelve dress shirts in a chromatic range from white to cream, all with double cuffs and eyelet collars, and bought him also the little silver barbell things that joined the collar tips behind the necktie.

  Cleaned up and steeled with a line of crushed Ritalin, Mark left the flat again. He liked crossing London by tube. If he was in the right mood, he could feel himself carried along on the human tide, and the experience imparted a pleasant anonymity; it made the leaf-in-the-stream stuff apparent, and he felt that he was connected to the sweaty straphangers—the adolescent transgressively sexifying her school uniform, the suave subcontinental with his head bobbing to the tinny Hindi that Mark could just make out.

  But despite the Ritalin zing, Mark’s mood was sour. Weaving around the abject tourists trying to work the ticket machine in the tube station, Mark resented them intensely and would have personally banished each one to the gulag for the offense of getting fatly in his way. He was not a leaf in a stream but a stone in a dark pool, sinking, and there was really no hope for humanity, because everyone’s out for himself and there’s no way around that.

  “You were right about the Chileans, by the way,” said Straw once they’d taken up their classic analytical positions—Straw supine on a couch and Mark in an Eames chair, facing some degrees away—“I mean, that I shouldn’t have gone into business with that lot. An unsavory people, the Chileans.” They were in Straw’s double-height great hall of an office, on a fog-spangled corner of the SineCo building in Canary Wharf.

  Mark could not remember formulating or articulating any opinion about Chileans or about going into business with them; he didn’t know what Straw was talking about. This was always happening with Straw. In such situations, you have about thirty seconds to say to someone I don’t know what you’re talking about, before your remaining silent rather commits you to the lie of pretending to understand. Mark was committed.

  Luckily
, James Straw was so deferred to that he never seemed to consider the possibility that a person he was speaking to might not be following his every Straw-centric turn, so he never asked for any confirmation. He had assistants whose job it was to de- and rebrief anyone leaving a Straw meeting to make sure that the poor schmuck understood what he had just been instructed to do. But Straw’s relationship with Mark was different. Straw considered Mark’s ear and counsel a relief from the pressures of his day and life (no one understood him, basically). Mark definitely got the sense that a few of Straw’s legion of assistants resented Mark’s having cut the line, particularly the elfin Swiss named Nils. So Mark had to watch out for those guys. It worked because his sessions with Straw were private; there was no one else in the room to hear just how transparently flattery-based Mark’s approach to Straw was. Straw spent their hour-long sessions complaining about inept inferiors and scheming competitors and greedy siblings and “communist” government regulators. Mark would simply listen, nod, and every few minutes say something like “Have you considered that these people might be motivated by jealousy or that they lack your grasp of the bigger picture?”

  The trick was the careful and well-timed echoing-back of Straw’s own ideas and phrases—the bigger picture came up regularly. In fact, in the year that Mark had been life-coaching Straw, he had constructed only the vaguest idea of what Straw’s workday consisted of or how SineCo churned out its billions. Syndicates acquired companies, or cornered sectors, or consolidated holdings. Mark did understand that Straw was something of an objectivist, though the man had never heard of Ayn Rand (he read exclusively nautical-adventure fiction and mass-market management theory), and over time, Mark heard himself agreeing by nods and I sees with an ever more market-based and owner-operated notion of how the world should be run.