Unraveling

by Owen Thomas

  He hung there in the wet air, by the tips of his fingers, his legs dangling above the echoing chaos. The muscles in his hands, which were as high above his head as they would ever reach, burned in a conflagration of pain that had licked its way down his forearms, scorched through his biceps and that was now laying waste to straining shoulders. Those very shoulders pinched the sides of his jaw like the gods were trying to pluck off his head with a pair of chicken drumsticks.

  Hollis kept his eyes closed, trying to shift his weight among the pads of his fingers. He told himself the muscles were just loosening, not ripping. He figured that he might last another thirty seconds if he was lucky. He felt the iron core of the world hanging its dead weight from his ankles.

  Beneath him was a riot of color and sound. Had he known about all the people, he might not have come. He might not have gotten himself into this situation. He might now be hitting a round of golf. Or taking a walk through the neighborhood. Or taking in the antique car show over at The Pavilion.

  But he was not doing any of those things. He was here. Hanging by his fingertips. He had been seduced. He had been touched by the young, slender finger of impulse and in an instant, as tends to happen, he had seized upon it.

  Impulses are rarely seized in isolation. These are herding, flocking, swarming, schooling moments of neuro-transmission that adhere tightly to their brethren through an epoxy made largely of organic momentum. Together, singular impulses form long, complicated molecular chains of impulsive causation which combine and interlace endlessly with each other in the brain, melding into a kind of braided rope of poor decision which is then toughened in a fortifying solution made from a neuro-chemical reduction of personality and vanity and experience, equal parts fear and hope. One end of the fortified, braided rope of poor decision is fed into the intricate interlocking cogs and gears of the brain that silently grind decision into action.

  As if to guarantee such action, the other end of the fortified, braided rope of poor decision is wrapped tightly around some particularly sensitive and strategic ganglia. Such as those in the scrotum.

  In this way, the seizing of a single, seemingly innocuous impulse had, in a chain of highly sequential and related impulses, lead Hollis Johns here, literally hanging by his fingertips above the cemented earth and the chaos of humanity.

  Fortunately, the cemented earth above which Hollis dangled had relatively recently suffered a large, deep and perfectly rectangular excavation. The resulting hole had been filled with a molecular solution of covalently bonded hydrogen and oxygen atoms, the former outnumbering the latter two to one, and into which had been dissolved a three inch tablet of sixty-two percent Sodium Dichloro-S-Triazinetrione. Hollis hung from a flexible, laminated tongue of polymeric silica measuring almost forty-six centimeters wide, just over three meters long and which jutted out over the rectangular concrete vat of molecules a good three meters above the surface.

  The fat boy shrieked girlishly and there was a slap and a splash and Hollis’ new BOT-Body muscle tee was suddenly wet. Hollis looked back over his shoulder and down toward the far end of the pool. She was still there. Still looking. His shoulders were shaking, the muscles beginning to melt inside their bags of skin.

  The impulse in question, the first in the chain, had occurred to him as he sat in his living room at nine o’clock Tuesday morning watching Ohio Sports Center’s Hall of Fame Highlights. The Ohio-Lights Show, as it was called in a madcap collision of exploding graphics and fonts, was a clip show of incredible passes, catches and goal line gambits, not just of the Buckeyes or Hall of Fame inductees as the name implied, but of college and professional teams throughout the country and across all time. A mainstay of The Ohio-Lights Show was a gag reel segment that featured tubs of Gatorade, near misses, goal-post collisions, and three hundred pound linebackers swan-diving into a garden of telephoto lenses. Also enjoyable were the musical montages of high-haltered, high-kicking, short-panted cheerleaders, inter-spliced with the slack-jawed lustful fans.

  Hollis was not a television watcher. But Sunday-afternoon sports were different. It did not particularly matter that it was Tuesday morning and not Sunday afternoon, since the Tuesday morning Ohio-Lights Show was simply a rebroadcast of what had aired on the previous Sunday afternoon. He had never seen the Ohio-Lights Show on Tuesday morning before retirement. Things were different now. Tuesday was the new Sunday.

  Nevertheless, as a rule, Hollis was not a television watcher. He generally chose not to indulge a video-obsessed culture that held in such contempt all manner of intelligence and depth of understanding. He would sooner be caught dead than watching a situation comedy or a single minute of cable news or, God forbid, paying eight dollars and fifty cents to see anything Hollywood had to offer at the Easton Town Center Cineplex, or anywhere for that matter. Very, very little of it was worth a damn. So little, it was simply not worth the effort. He had survived the 1990’s, quite proudly, without ever having suffered a single episode of Seinfeld. He had not watched an evening talk show since the reign of Johnny Carson. The last time he had seen any sketch comedy broadcast, Chevy Chase was making Gerald Ford into a klutz.

  Of course, Hollis understood that he had seen more television, a great deal more, than he had actually watched. Seeing and watching were not remotely the same concepts. Flipping through silent images as he sat alone in a darkened living room at eleven in the evening waiting for Susan to vacate the shower, or at two in the morning, unable to sleep, did not count as purposefully watching television; enjoying it; or being entertained.

  And while, in precisely this manner, Hollis had thoroughly canvassed the length and breadth of the wasteland that is cable subscription video entertainment – including a lot of bad Hollywood, old episodes of every television series ever produced, and slow, lingering passes through the 600-series of spice channels that catered to the kind of prurient, obsessive appetites he did not have, tailored to please an intellectually and morally impoverished culture to which he did not belong – he did not, he told himself, actually watch television. Not in the sense of decoding and actually integrating into his consciousness the riot of images flattening themselves up against the bloodshot membranes that sheltered his optic nerve from all manner of harmful compromise.

  So, no, Hollis did not watch television. He knew that the quality of being a non-television watcher distinguished him favorably from most of his countrymen. It was, to him, a quietly meaningful distinction. It was also a distinction that he had, more than once, made the mistake of sharing with his family who greatly enjoyed accusing him of dishonest hairsplitting when it came to defending his honor against insinuations of brotherhood in the digital age.

  David had once suggested that on the issue of television Hollis had adopted a Clintonian model of truth. The remark had been to Susan’s great mirth, for they both knew well the extreme, nearly irrational contempt that Hollis held for the forty-second President of the United States – that justly impeached but tragically acquitted antagonist to all things wholesome, to all things American, and, yes, to Hollis Johns personally. Hollis Johns, who had cast his vote for George Herbert Walker Bush soundly and with a conviction undeterred by the name of Daniel Quayle in the same box. Hollis Johns, who had seen William Jefferson Clinton – that Southern huckster, that smooth-talking, mongering, unprincipled, saxophone fellating, pandering scourge of a politician – from a long, long ways off. Hollis Johns who had goddamned pointed Clinton out and warned everybody and who had not hesitated to remind everyone when the time came that they should have listened to him.

  At a series of now infamous dinner rows, Hollis had laughed, openly and without reservation, at David’s impassioned but rather sophomoric tirades over the supposed prosecutorial excesses of Kenneth Starr and a vast right-wing conspiracy bent on driving “a good man” from office. A good man?! Hollis had shaken his head in dismissive amusement at the ease with which his son’s generation was able to shrug its shoulders at perjury and obstruction of justice, offering d
eference to the “political irrelevance” of infidelity and wholly manufactured concerns over sexual privacy. It’s nobody’s business?!!

  When David had exhausted himself, Hollis had delivered an eloquent rebuttal on the importance of the rule of law, the dignity of the Office of the President, and the pathology of dishonesty that plagued William Jefferson Clinton. In a mocking swipe at the over-intellectualized, semantic contortionist strategies adopted by the President and his defenders to excuse the inexcusable, Hollis had organized his rebuttal around a dissection of what he referred to as the Clintonian Model of Truth. And he had provided a lot of examples to illustrate his point.

  But impeachment had not, alas, led to conviction. The Great Scourge – the great perjuring, obstructing, adulterous, intern-despoiling, indiscriminate-dna-spewing, lycra-soiling scourge had skated. Hollis had done his part to make sure George W. Bush was sworn into office on his mission to restore moral character and honesty to the Executive Branch. A uniter, not a divider. One nation, under George. But that ground-swelling deliverance had ultimately felt soft and disappointing when compared with the sharp vindication of the conviction he had imagined. A conviction might have stemmed the tide; might have fired a warning shot across the bow of an irresponsible generation, a culture adrift, his son, his daughter, God Almighty his daughter, then still the hellion, fresh from his grasp and headed for the abyss. A conviction would have helped. We have standards. There are limits. There are consequences. But no.

  Hollis had pushed and persuaded, night after night, dinner after dinner, pressing his case that it was time for a change and that George W was the agent of that change. And so Susan, too, had voted for George W, although she had done so with such ambivalence and then had felt such remorse upon learning the close division in Ohio and upon witnessing the Florida recount fiasco that she did not consider herself a Bush supporter by the time Al Gore, Vice President to the Great Scourge, had conceded the race for the second time. By the time George W placed his hand on the Bible, Susan had declared that she already hated him and had blamed Hollis for a vote she considered to have been wasted.

  Hollis did not importune his children on the subject of the presidential race, and neither David nor Tilly had ventured their opinions. Tilly was out of the house by then and spoke to him about nothing at all anyway. David, having learned his lesson from the impeachment arguments, had adopted a strategy of deftly avoiding all discussion of politics whenever he came to visit.

  But it was not as though Hollis had needed to be specifically informed of their opinions. He knew exactly how his children voted. Like Ohio itself, the Johns family had split itself up the middle. One half of their numbers had cancelled out the other half. Nobody’s vote had counted. And when all the chad had settled and the son of George Herbert Walker Bush had begun his first day on the job, restoring honesty and integrity to the White House, Hollis found himself on one side of a great chasm staring across a void of understanding at the rest of his family.

  Not that they had ever entirely understood him before the election. They hadn’t understood him. Not even close. But they had afforded him something closer to a good faith benefit of the doubt. As George W had gone about the country’s business of disinfecting the doorknobs in the Lincoln Bedroom, Hollis had found himself increasingly marginalized as an authority figure in his own home.

  It was not something he had imagined. His opinions counted for less. His decisions were routinely interpreted as suggestions. His money – the fruits of his daily labor for a promiscuous, merge-happy bank that was, at that time, just beginning to develop a roving eye for young, sexy, insubstantial leadership – was taken for granted and frittered away without a second thought, while increasingly his judgment and wisdom and greater perspective on the many questions of life, large and small, were painstakingly and suspiciously weighed before they could be accepted. Even his own perspective on his own life and his own experience, was subject to second-guessing.

  Such as whether he was a watcher of television.

  David had been over for dinner. He had made an obscure reference to an old situation comedy that involved a masturbatory contest of four do-nothing Manhattanites. Susan had laughed. David had laughed. Ben had laughed. Hollis had not laughed. David had explained. Susan had laughed. David had laughed. Ben had laughed. Hollis had smiled in a polite if-you-say-so manner, but still had not laughed. As Hollis looked on, Susan had explained to David that Hollis was feeling superior. Hollis had stated matter-of-factly that he did not watch television and, therefore, was not aware of the program. David was incredulous. Never? Like, not even once? For more than a decade? Jerry? Kramer? Hollis had shrugged. Susan had shaken her head and continued cutting her meat, speaking of him to his son as though Hollis were not in the room, blatantly contradicting him. He watches that damn television all the time, she had said. I’m sure he’s watched the show. Hollis had taken calm exception. He has seen television, true, and maybe even the program they were discussing – whatever it was called, although he could not be sure for it did not sound familiar or the least bit interesting to him, but for whatever he may or may not have seen, he most certainly did not watch television.

  They had looked at him. Incredulous. Speechless. And then the laughter. Side-splitting. Capillary dilating. Tear-spilling laughter. Ben had joined in raucously, obliviously, co-opted by their mirthful ridicule. Hollis had eaten his food. Placid. Unapologetic. More laughter. David had been the first to recover.

  “Well, I can’t think of a better example of a Clintonian Model of Truth.”

  And there it stuck, vibrating, his own dagger, splintering the wood on the table next to the dish of broccoli. Hollis had looked up, almost expecting to find his daughter, Tilly, the one he could count on to have that kind of aim and intent. But it was not Tilly. It was David. And Susan next to him laughing and clapping. And Ben, sweet Ben, next to her clapping and laughing, oblivious but following. They were all Tilly. Tilly by proxy.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The Clintonian Model of Tru…”

  “I know the phrase, David. What are you talking about?”

  “Hollis…”

  “Relax, Susan. Well?”

  In comically sardonic fashion, David had made the point – wholly invalid as far as Hollis was concerned – that in much the same way that his antagonist, the Great Scourge, had smoked marijuana, but never “inhaled”, or had reveled in fellatio and a misplaced cigar but had never had “sexual relations,” or the way he had so cleverly trained objective reality to pivot upon a legal parsing of the word “is,” Hollis regularly saw television, but never watched it.

  Though cloaked as a harmless ribbing, Hollis had recognized David’s rebuke for the cheap shot that it actually was. It was sour grapes, is what it was. The Great Scourge had had his day and had pulled the entire Democratic Party, and David, into the mire, floundering and sputtering. They had refused to see The Great Scourge coming in 1992 when they elected him. They had refused to see The Great Scourge in 1996 when, incredibly, they sent him back for another four years. And, most unforgivably, they had stood by him and rallied to his defense as he ejaculated all over the Oval Office. Well, fine. But there was a price to pay. George W. Bush was that price. Of course David did not like it. Of course he had a taste of sour grapes. Of course he was lashing out, in his own way, with his little disingenuous observations. The Clintonian Model of Truth. Very clever. But, in the end, the score had been quite clear. Hollis had seen The Great Scourge coming. David had not. Hollis had lobbied for impeachment. David had lobbied for acquittal and had decried the very process of holding the President accountable an exercise of partisan thuggery. Hollis had predicted the voters would throw the bums out. David had predicted the voters would punish Republicans for Kenneth Starr’s “inquisition.” Hollis had predicted that Albert Gore would not be able to scrub off the stench of The Great Scourge and that he would suffer the consequences of his freely chosen political associations. David touted
Mr. Gore as the Second Coming. In the end, the Democrats and the utter lack of judgment and moral standards for which that party had become known, had been tossed out on their ears. Hollis, meanwhile, had been vindicated by a majority of the American … well, by a lot of Americans anyway, and a majority of the United States Supreme Court.

  Hollis had looked squarely at David and had said nothing. He finished his wine, refilled his glass and began sawing his meat with his knife. David and Susan had exchanged uncomfortable glances.

  “Hollis?”

  “…”

  “Hollis?”

  “MmmHmm?”

  There had been no greater evidence of David’s ignoble intent than the abruptness with which he had changed the subject to, of all things, Buckeye football, a pastime that Hollis knew from years of disappointment, held absolutely no interest for his son.

  “Hey dad, so what’s the deal with Bellasari?” He had asked out of nowhere. “That guy couldn’t hit a receiver from six feet away if his life depended on it.”

  Hollis had smiled, taken a drink and chewed. Silence had quickly filled the room.

  And then he had played along with David’s charade, offering his honest opinion on the Buckeyes’ quarterback, because whatever David may choose to imagine were the similarities between the Great Scourge and his own father, Hollis was beyond a petty pissing-match with his son.

  “Did you actually watch the game?”

  “Well…no.”

  “I thought not. Bellasari’s not the problem, David. He’s the best quarterback we’ve had in years. Do you have any idea of his stats? Coach Cooper is the problem. He’s built an offensive line that would work great with Bellasari’s ability to get out there and run with the ball, but he calls in plays that force Bellasari to hang back in the pocket and throw it off to Combs and Sanders. So what would you have him do?”

  Hollis had seen the retreat in David’s eyes. The bluff had been called. He had thoroughly swamped his son’s shallow understanding of the game. In the future, Hollis had thought to himself, maybe David would think twice about trying to mollify him with opinions on subjects he really knew nothing about.