by David Shafer
Since coming to London, though, Straw had begun to talk more during their sessions about the nature of his business empire. Lately, he was very excited by a new branch of SineCo he was calling the Core Vision Department. Mark assumed that such a department would churn out PR claptrap about the core vision of the company, something about how everyone should be empowered by choice and leveraging knowledge and improving access et cetera. That had been a large part of Mark’s job for the biogenetics company in Cambridge: writing very abstract copy about the value of innovation.
But when Straw explained further, Mark had to wonder why he was staffing this Core Vision Department with expensive new hires from the cream of the digital-slacker class. Straw was poaching code-writing princes from computer science departments and subcontinental shantytowns and billing-software companies and failed music-downloading sites. He mentioned three hundred new hires in the past month. That was no PR department. It piqued Mark’s curiosity.
Today, Straw was very excited about the Core Vision thing. But it seemed to Mark that Straw was now calling it New Alexandria. He was apparently describing some sort of Tolkienesque realm where knowledge could be stored and protected. He kept saying that what was needed was all the information in one place; then everyone with access to that information would be able to make perfect decisions.
“Imagine it, Mark,” said Straw from his couch, “all those other operations, muddled by imperfect markets and stunted by the bureaucrats—they will all become obsolete. With a single stroke! And New Alexandria will stand alone. The world will never be the same.”
Mark had long ago blown past the point at which he could say: I’m sorry, what the fuck are you talking about? But there was a limit, even for Mark, to what one could pretend to understand. What were the other operations, and how were they muddled by markets and stunted by bureaucrats? By bureaucrats, Straw usually meant anyone in the public sector, from the president to the postman.
“It does sound extraordinary, James,” said Mark. “But, to be honest, I’m not certain I understand what you mean. You’ll have to go back a bit. If you could.”
At this, James Straw turned quickly on his couch and craned to face Mark. Straw was in good shape for a man his age, but this was the lithe maneuver of a much younger man. Mark found it jarring.
“No. There is no way you could understand it. Not yet. Forgive me, Mark. There is a part of this that I have had to keep even from you. I have partners in the project, great men. Men of vision and risk, like the two of us. But there are rules, procedures.” He waved his hand before his face and shrugged a shoulder, as if to acknowledge the strange reality that even he, James Straw, could be bound by rules and procedures.
“I’ll tell you what,” he said. “Join me on board Sine Wave next week, will you? By then I will have secured the necessary permissions. Can you?”
Sine Wave. Straw’s yacht. At last. Was Mark supposed to say that he would need to check his calendar? Some pretense that Mark was very busy with other professional and intellectual pursuits had always been part of his thing with Straw. But no, this was different; this was new waters.
“It would be my pleasure, James.”
“Excellent.” Straw rose from the couch and crossed to his desk, stabbed at the intercom. “Gertrude. Mark will be joining me at sea next week. Arrange for it. Let’s say Tuesday.”
“You will be at Bilderberg on Tuesday, sir.”
“Balls,” said Straw. “How long is that?”
“Two days in Aberdeen, sir. You are tentative for Thursday transfer to—”
He cut her off. “Yes, yes, fine. Arrange transport for Mark for Friday.”
“Very well, sir.”
Leaving the SineCo building, Mark had a veritable spring in his step. The invitation to the yacht felt like a game changer. Straw had been stingily withholding that invitation for a year, dropping lines about, like, the passage to Majorca in such a way as to arouse interest from Mark and saying, I must have you aboard sometime, but then not summoning an assistant, which was how Straw alchemized wish into reality. Mark was deeply excited simply to join the tiny subset of people who’d ever set loafer on the megayacht. He had read about Sine Wave in the Wall Street Journal. Straw was not the kind of man who allowed his yacht to be photographed or featured, so the only photos in the article were long-lens exteriors. Still, the vessel was said to have ten decks and two helipads, a tennis court, anti-pirate devices, and a crew of Italians in crisp whites. Also a driving range, an herbarium, and a surgical theater.
But hours later, the springy step was gone. It was a night with a wicked slope.
He walked home from Straw’s office and dined in some fuck-off restaurant in Canary Wharf. Mark loved a good fuck-off restaurant. He loved the stuffy, expense-account places with the board-presented menus and the bread rolls swaddled in ironed napkins and the chilled butter pats brought on saucers. He loved the trendy, dismal, haute-cuisine joints with the square furniture and the pixie waitrons and the cracked mirror decor. He loved displaying to waitstaff, with his charm, his informed questions, and his swift decisions, that he was a person happy and allowed to spend a hundred pounds on dinner for himself. Eating alone in an expensive restaurant, reading a magazine or a book, he thought he must look powerful and intriguing—an important business traveler, or maybe a tragic young widower.
But that’s not what happened tonight. Tonight there was something off about everything. He’d come in too early and he was nearly alone in the posh restaurant, which turned out to be a steakhouse, all brass and carpet. The staff hadn’t even really finished their opening chores; he could hear a radio playing in the kitchen and he could smell a bleachy bucket behind the bar. The pretty waitress was not taken with him. That was clear. She saw the Superyachts Monthly magazine that he hadn’t hidden well enough beneath his notebook, and she raised her eyebrows in a tiny, devastating way.
No, no, it’s not like that, he wanted to say to her. I’m not some schlub pressing my face to the glass. I bought this magazine because the world’s fourth-richest man just invited me aboard his yacht. And they were out of Megayachts Monthly. The yachts in this magazine are smaller than the one I’m going to be on next Friday.
But then the stern part of him yelled at the stupid part of him, the part that cared whether this waitress knew how close he was to power. Don’t you also want to tell her that the only reason you’re so close to power is that someone misunderstood the one good thing you ever wrote, the stern part yelled, and that you’re stuck in a lie that’s going to bring you down or eat you up?
And like a child running upstairs to get away from his parents’ screaming, the real Mark, who was neither the stern one nor the stupid one—who was both—ordered a fifty-quid bottle of Rioja and a rare steak. He needed to work on the Blinc manuscript. He tried to write in his notebook, tried to at least look like he was writing in his notebook. But he knew what he really looked like: he looked like a man drinking quickly, alone, in the early evening.
He left that place after the bottle of wine and wandered west, into Brick Lane eventually. It was real evening now, and the city was full of life. He found a busy pub and drank thick pints at the bar. He realized that he was bothered by something from before the yacht invitation. James Straw had been keeping things from him? That was unsettling. Mark knew that there was plenty he didn’t know, situations he needed help with. This Blinc book situation, for example, had definitely gotten away from him. But with Straw, he had at least been certain that he knew more than the old man about what was going on between them. Now he wasn’t so sure.
With a single stroke! Straw had said, and he’d chopped the air in front of him. What could that mean?
Well, in a week he would find out; he would be brought in on the Core Vision Department or New Alexandria or whatever. Most likely, it would turn out to be some vain and boondoggly tycoon project. Even Straw’s worst ideas had full-time staffs. Straw was an art collector, a philanthropist, a professional nemesis t
o tax collectors all over the world. (“I don’t have any money, Mark,” he said once in a session when Mark had accidentally mentioned that Straw had a lot of money. “Money only passes through me.”)
Leaving the pub, Mark misjudged his drunkenness and knocked into a pair of men smoking near the door. “Sorry,” he said. Which wasn’t enough for one of the men, who looked him up and down, judged him no threat, and said, “I’ll crack your head, you nancy Yank shite.” The accent was broad, and the man was smiling in a dangerous way when he said it, so Mark didn’t understand at first. As the man leaned in closer, Mark saw a scar on his face that must have reduced his investment in it. His friend made to restrain him. “Best move on now,” said the friend to Mark, “he’s had a few.”
So Mark moved on, quickly. It was probably a little routine of theirs, just a couple of poseur bullies, but it still dumped a bucket of fear down his spinal cord, and on the heels of that, a shame at his physical cowardice. Nancy meant “fag,” right? How he wished he were with his long-ago friend Wallace, a bear-size homo from Wyoming and Harvard who spoke of dick-sucking in a farm-boy drawl and took pleasure in the lead-up to the barroom fights he got into and won every time.
How had the guy known Mark could be intimidated? Was it the vibrating chord of his cowardice? Charm and wiles were all Mark had; those were no good in close-quarters combat.
Once, long ago, when he was a boy playing Matchbox cars at a friend’s house, he heard the friend’s construction-foreman father call his dad “that ankle-grabber.” The friend’s mother said, “Hank, please!,” in a way that Mark knew even then meant the accusation was more than idle. It had needled him ever since.
Mark was nearing the shawarma place with the attached off-license. But it was closed already. So he stopped into the pub with the doors black as polished boots. He wasn’t drunk enough to sleep. And this was the bar where he’d met the guy who gave him the number of the guy who delivered drugs by bicycle. He had a pint at the bar, and then he texted the number, using the little code the guy had written on the back of the card. Sardines was cannabis. Herring was coke. Salmon was salt heroin. Mark had no need of herring—the Ritalin was better anyway—and despite his tough act, he was a little afraid of salmon. He ordered sardines. Twenty-one grams, because this book wasn’t gonna write itself.
The walk home proved more challenging than he had anticipated. Navigational issues. That should be one of the Ten Steps to Committed Living: Take Careful Note of Route from Pub to Home. He wandered for an hour, deeply lost, probably within a quarter mile of where he was trying to be. There was Sheepshead Lane and there was Mince Pie Close, but where the fuck was his street? At one point, he found himself behind what seemed to be a Roman avenue of auto garages: impact wrenches whizzed and whined in the moonless night; fluorescent light spilled from half-open shop doors, wooden, eight feet tall. From one, men shouted in a language Mark hadn’t the foggiest of. Then, later, he dead-ended at a canal and leaned over to get a better look at what was bobbing beside an oil drum in a yellow-foamed eddy on the greasy surface of the canal.
Ah. A bloated pit bull, its eyes a-bug, its swollen tongue distended.
Other men might panic. About the swollen pit bull staring at him with crazed eyes from a greasy vortex, or about the fact that he had been tripped up by vanity and then by greed. But Mark panicked about neither. He backtracked to the last recognizable point, made an executive decision, and then vectored through a smaller grid of streets and lanes. There, at the end of one, was his.
Steps One through Ten were and always would be: Never Give Up.
And then ten seconds spent on the doorstep of the flat searching his pockets for keys, a crystal-clear image in his head of the three-key ring reclining on the bar top of that last pub.
But then, hosanna! there they were, in the Slydini pocket that his tailor had engineered into the brown suit jacket. Interior. Lower left side. Three by four, with a horizontal flap. The keys dropped into his palm.
He unlocked, and locked behind him. But the stairwell light would not come on. Mark found his lighter and ascended the steep steps like an Egyptologist, the wan flicker of the weak Bic, his left hand feeling the rough brick and stone of the stairwell walls.
He had seen her once. His stillborn sister. His mom was holding her, and his dad was holding his mom. His dad had parked him in a plastic chair in the hospital hallway and told him to wait. But he heard a sob from his mother, and love trumped fear and he ducked into the room. In his memory, his dad was wearing a hat. Was it a trilby? A fedora? Seemed unlikely. His dad did indeed wear such hats, but surely not under those circumstances?
The baby was dry and lilac and still and had died before she was born. His dad was about to send him out again, but his mom said, No, let him stay. So he held her tiny hand for a moment, his mom’s hand enclosing theirs both. Someone once asked him if he had ever seen a ghost. He’d said no but he could have said yes.
Chapter 12
Quivering Pines
After his interview with the doctor, Leo was moved from the intake single to a more spartan, shared room in the men’s wing. It looked like a room in a small, mid-price-range motel. Taupe carpet and wood laminate.
Leo’s roommate was a goateed man in the drifts of his forties who looked like a melancholic devil and carried without comment the incredible name of James Dean. He did not clutter the air with clatter about which dresser was his and here’s how the shower works or any of that. That first evening, Leo stayed in their little room and James stayed out of Leo’s way. Leo skipped dinner out of embarrassment—he wasn’t ready to explain to anyone what he was doing here. He thought he would be gone by the end of the weekend anyway. James came back from dinner with a glob of rice pudding in a plastic clamshell and gave it to Leo like a prom corsage.
“The rice pudding’s good here,” he said.
At nine thirty, when reading or journaling was recommended, James read from a worn paperback about the Stoics. From its cover, the alabaster bust of some stern beardo stared pupil-lessly. At ten o’clock, the onion-looking counselor walked down the long corridor of the men’s wing, rapping once on each door or door frame. James didn’t budge, so neither did Leo; he made no move for the light switch or the door.
“Curfew!” said the Onion on his return trip up the corridor. He stepped just over the threshold of their room, like a big shot.
“Yeah. Just one minute, Gene,” said James, “this is a great paragraph right here.” The Onion made a show of waiting impatiently while James did a fair impression of being just fascinated by a paragraph. Then the Onion went to switch off the light and James quickly held up an index finger without taking eye from page. The gesture made the Onion pause, after which he realized that he had paused, which pissed him off, which made him snap the light off. “Those are false idols, James. False idols,” said the Onion as he closed the door in a too-swift way that made it clear James had won that skirmish.
Leo assumed the show was at least partly for him, and he was gratified. The one summer he was sent to camp—fourteen—his bunkmate turned out to be an overweight emotional bully who played the French horn and masturbated ceaselessly. In these situations, a good bunkmate helped a lot.
“Gene’s a big Christian,” said James from the shadow of the other side of the room. “Very easy to needle, I think you’ll find.” Moonlight came through the window, fell on the pine veneer and the taupe carpeting. Leo noticed the strange viscosity of the institutional bedding. “The good doctor is also a Christian, I think. Though if so, he is a sly one, and difficult to needle.”
The I think you’ll find part was as good a welcome to this place as Leo had yet received. It planted a seed in Leo, that maybe he might choose to stay here.
He was nowhere near sleep. The fluidity of his last thirty hours, the uncertainty of the next thirty, at least made this an exciting turn in what he now saw was his poorly led and dim-prospected life. He wanted to stick around to find out whether talking his way in
to rehab would turn out to be a good idea or just a brief detour in a longer descent.
James must have sensed that Leo, though silent, was miles from sleep, because he started talking. Just started telling his story in a nice baritone voice. It was like a rehab lullaby; a country ballad with no music.
He was a criminal defense attorney from Vancouver, Washington. He had fended off a DUI three months back. Now, concurrent complaints about him by his ex-wife, his business partner, his girlfriend, his parents, and the state’s attorney had made his appearance at Quivering Pines the best of a very limited range of options. He copped to the charges immediately. More or less. That is, he admitted up-front that he couldn’t seem to stop smoking crack cocaine, that he regularly lost his car, that his legal career was in tatters. And while he objected to the creepiness of the word, he conceded that he had technically, legally, stalked his girlfriend. “But I love her,” he said. “I love terrible things.” He allowed that his ex-wife could fairly be called saintly and long-suffering for putting up with his shit. But he said she was also a vindictive harpy ball squeezer who could drain the joy from a Ferris wheel. Their five-year-old son, Caleb, had been lately wreaking havoc and throwing all the antisocial he could at the Vancouver public-school system.
But the business partner was a scheming little prick and should not be credited. On that point, James was crystal clear. The two men owned a sports tavern on a busy stretch of state highway. James owned 55 percent.
“It’s called Aces. Pretty grim. Lots of cardboard cutouts and hangy-down advertisements. But, you know, ten grand cash, easy, on the big nights.”
James was barred from the premises of his own tavern. “All I need to do is have a drink in there every night, just to remind the staff that I’m a real person. That dickbag has turned them all against me. I could’ve drunk Sprite. I mean, I couldn’t have. But, you know. Judge was ready to include the workplace exemption in the DUI adjudication when Dickbag gets me barred. Submits an affidavit, says staff may feel compromised by me. Whatever that means. And if you’re working at Aces, you’re pretty compromised already, to be frank. I just wonder which one of my enemies told that moron what an affidavit is. I think he may be making a play for my ex-wife. You believe that?”
