Dr. King's Refrigerator

by Charles Johnson

  But Turk would not budge on Bennett.

  “Why discuss this any further?” he said, after Bennett returned to Chicago and Childs to Atlanta. Between the three of you, a bottle of scotch from the bottom drawer of your filing cabinet was passed around, Nips drinking from a paper cup, Turk from a coffee mug imprinted with the insignia of the Sea-hawks. He’d made his decision by seven P.M., but Turk was notorious for being a morning person, and you seldom trusted anything he said or did after lunch when his vitality was low, his round face flushed pink, his manner rude, and his judgments often dubious. “Bennett will be good for the operation, especially overseas. As reliable, I believe, as old Gladys. I think she can weather any crisis that comes along, make us a lot of money, and keep the stockholders happy. That’s all I need to know.” He chuckled into his mug. “She’s no Nicholas Leeson.”

  “Who?” you asked.

  “The British kid who brought down Baring Brothers and Company. You remember, don’t you? The company was two hundred and thirty-two years old. It helped finance the Napoleonic wars. Lord knows how it happened, but they made Leeson manager of their Singapore office, and he gambled that the Tokyo market would go up. Turns out, it went down, and eight hundred million of Baring’s money with it.” Turk laughed again, wickedly. “I love that story. Just shows you what can happen if you hire wrong.”

  “But,” asked Nips, “does Bennett deserve the job more than Childs?”

  Turk’s face tightened in a frown. “How’s that again—deserve, I heard you say? We have a job to offer, and it’s ours to extend or withhold as we see fit. We may hire or fire the most qualified employee, as legal scholar Richard Epstein puts it, for good reason, bad reason, or no reason at all.”

  “And you think that’s prudent?”

  “I think it’s practical, yes. And perfectly within our rights.”

  “You are not,” pressed Nips, “concerned about discrimination?”

  “Oh, pshaw! We all discriminate, Nips! Every moment of every day we choose one thing rather than another on the basis of our tastes, prejudices, and preferences. How else can we achieve life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? I remember that you, back in our school days, never deigned to direct your affections toward women taller than yourself or, for that matter, toward men. It’s reasonable, I’m saying, to have likes and dislikes, and to act upon them, to prefer this over that because, for heaven’s sake, no two things in nature are the same. Really, man, be realistic. The Japanese don’t spend a moment agonizing over things like this, and look how they trumped us in the eighties! Preferential policies have weakened this nation’s GNP. And just how is one to decide whom to prefer when not only blacks but Hispanics, Native Americans, and twenty-eight varieties of Asians are listed as preferred by the federal government?”

  Nips listened patiently, as he always did when Turk, slightly in his cups, tilted toward the pomp and preachment of a Thrasymachus. He nodded in agreement. “Racial categories do cause a lot of confusion.” For a few moments he said nothing, hoping, no doubt, that you and Turk would ponder the stories reported about whites with only a fraction of Mexican or Indian blood who invoked a distant minority in their family tree to qualify for the government’s set-aside programs.

  Then quietly, he asked, “Do you remember that class we took with John Rawls?”

  “Vaguely, yes. I nearly flunked it. Had something to do with the state being like a joint-stock company. A lot of Hobbes and Locke rehashed, if I recall it rightly.”

  “There was more to it than that. He said when justice is seen as fairness, men of unequal circumstances agree to share one another’s fate. Social advantage and native endowment of any sort—whether they be inherited wealth, talent, beauty, or imagination—are undeserved. They are products of the arbitrariness of fortune. But Rawls did not say we must eradicate these inequities, only adjust them so the least favored benefit too. If the fortunate do not share, then the least advantaged have every right to break the social contract that has so miserably failed to serve their needs. They riot. They rebel. Without the cooperation of the least favored, the social order collapses for everyone.”

  “I remember you did well in that course—”

  “Better than you because in my final paper, I argued that it is in the interest of the favored to redress the wrongs caused by slavery and a century of segregation.”

  “Wronged by whom? Nips, I can assure you I had nothing to do with it. All that happened before our time!”

  “Then we have no greater social obligations?”

  “My dear friend,” Turk said, patting Nips on his knee, “making the monthly payroll on time so employees and their families are not unduly inconvenienced is, in my humble opinion, social obligation enough. I am for the candidate who puts that first.”

  “Be honest,” said Nips, “you’re just not comfortable with colored people, are you?”

  “That’s hardly fair! I can’t say, because I don’t know any!”

  “Exactly my point.”

  They argued that way for most of the evening, through three bottles of whiskey, long after Gladys clicked off the lights in the outer office (she pretty much ran the place, knew where all the bodies were buried, and was always the first employee to arrive and the last to leave). Turk and Nips staggered out together, carrying their disagreement into the hallway and elevator, neither of them willing to support the other’s candidate for the job.

  It falls to you to break the tie.

  Come midnight, you are still torn, divided within as if you were two people, or perhaps three. No question that these candidates are antinomies. But what, then, is the just decision? Could there be color-blind decisions in a country wracked by race? Or was Turk correct that it was not a question of racial justice at all? All night you have worried this question into mere words, a blur of sound signifying, it seems, nothing. And now it is too late to catch the last ferry home to Whidbey Island. Emilie no doubt has already tucked the children in bed and turned in for the night. After taking off your suit coat, kicking off your shoes, pulling loose your tie and top button, you run water into the coffeemaker, then wearily plop down on the black leather sofa, rubbing your face with both hands. You spread the files on the coffee table, staring at them for another hour. A black man. A white woman. No. That was wrong. These empty signifiers had names, faces, specific histories that exploded sterile sociological categories and rendered both candidates ineffable and inexhaustible in their individuality. Their portfolios provided no clues whatsoever to their promise, or to unkeying the paradox of justice. Wearily, you push them away, close your eyes, and drift in and out of sleep until sunlight brightens the room and, below the office window, night’s silence swells with the sound of morning traffic.

  Gladys opens the outer door at eight A.M. Her key in the latch sends you hurrying in your stocking feet to the bathroom and closet adjacent to your chamber. After splashing water on your face and brushing your teeth with two fingers, you reach into the closet where you keep a few fresh shirts still encased in crackling plastic from the cleaners. This is where your father kept his extra shirts and ties. It’s where you played sometimes as a child, hiding in the closet when he dictated letters to Gladys. Four decades ago she’d been heartbreakingly beautiful, a brunette with bee-stung lips and eyes so green, so light, you wondered if she could really see through them. That she was quiet yet gentle, always smiling ironically, as if she had a secret, never talked about herself, or her relations in New Orleans, or what she did away from the office only added an element of mystery to the gaps in what one knew personally about her. You suppose a man like your father could fill that with all manner of fantasies if his marriage was stale, his duties heavy, and he believed, rightly or wrongly, that her secrets could heal. Your mother was the one who’d told you these things, but not angrily, because she’d had several affairs of her own. In fact, she’d seemed as amused by the brevity of your father’s only midlife fling as by his choice.

  Around your thro
at the shirt’s top button strains, a sign you’re getting fatter at fifty-one. You’re about to swear when something happens outside in your office that stops you cold. Someone is whistling a few bars from “Uptown Downbeat,” an Ellington tune, one of your father’s favorites. Walking to the bathroom’s partly opened door, you see Gladys tidying up the files you left on the coffee table. Her hair, once obsidian and shiny, curls around her head in a cap of gray when she removes her rainbow-colored scarf. Believing herself to be alone in the office, she does a little dance step, snapping her fingers, shaking her hips, and for a flicker-flash instant she seems as young, as beautiful as Halle Berry.

  Different.

  Then she notices you, abruptly stops dancing, and, after composing herself—she is Estelle Getty again—steps to the window and opens the curtains, flooding the room with sunlight.

  “You didn’t spend the night here again, did you?” For years she’s spoken like that, the way a doting godmother would. It takes you a moment to find your voice.

  “Afraid so.”

  “Would you like me to put on some coffee?”

  “Please.”

  You watch her leave, understanding only now why she looked away when the blacks in middle management complained that there were no Negroes in administration. How had Nips put it? Categories were chimerical. Mere constructs. When she comes back, carrying a carafe filled with water and a bag of Starbucks, you try not to stare or seem too confounded that Gladys is black. Or is she? By all appearances, she is as white as you.

  “Gladys,” you say, clearing your throat, “you met both Bennett and Childs. Which one would you feel best about hiring?”

  She pauses, cupping the carafe in both hands. “Is this a trick question?”

  “No, honestly, which one?”

  “Well, I liked them both, but—”

  “But what?”

  “Oh, it’s nothing, just that Mr. Childs reminds me of Mr. Turk when he was hired. Neither was very much at ease. And I know your father never approved of Mr. Turk. His references weren’t that good, if I remember, or his grades, but he got the job because he was your friend and you insisted. You acted on his behalf, and that was all right.” She smiles and you see Halle Berry again; then, as the muscles around her mouth relax, Estelle Getty. “These matters are never neutral, are they?”

  “No . . . I’d forgotten. . . .”

  “And people are not what they seem initially.”

  “No . . .”

  “It takes time to know anyone.”

  “Yes, I guess it does.”

  “Will there be anything else?”

  “Gladys, I’m not sure how to ask this. You and my father—”

  “Yes, sir?” Her smile is disarming, as if she knows what you need to say. “He was a wonderful man, one I could trust. I miss him very much.”

  “So do I. You can trust me too.”

  “I know that. Thank you, sir.”

  She returns to making the coffee, then when it is done brings you a cup with two packets of sugar and one of Cremora. Sitting down on the chair beside your desk, both hands folded on her lap, she asks:

  “Did you decide?”

  You tell her you have, lifting the cup, sipping carefully so as not to scald your lips. Your secretary has always taken her lunches alone. You know why, but today you will ask her to join you and Nips at Etta’s, near the Pike Place Market.

  “Shall I ring that person for you?”

  “I think so, it must be eleven in Atlanta by now.”

  Better Than Counting Sheep

  ALTHOUGH IT embarrasses me to talk about my problems, I feel I have a responsibility to share with others the specific nightmare that took hold of my life one month ago, to share the condition I tried to keep secret but which was so obvious to everyone—especially to my colleagues and students in the Classics Department—to share the curse, if I may call it that, which began during the first week of classes this fall at the university, and how I discovered a cure.

  Forgive me if I seem a bit evasive. My gift is not for gab but is instead for solitary research, and it’s not in my nature to talk overly much about myself. In fact, I’ve always dreaded being the center of attention, especially at professional conferences, where the thought of delivering a paper, with all those eyes grabbing at me, only magnified the shyness I’ve suffered from since I was a child. On the whole, and in general, I’m happiest when I’m quietly absorbed in study or solving an arcane puzzle of scholarship. So yes, it’s true: I’ve always been a rather fubsy, bespeckled man with Chesterfieldian manners and more than a little resemblance to the late actor Burgess Meredith, or so my colleagues tell me, and for three decades my life has consisted of shuffling back and forth between my classes on Plato and my carrel at Suzzalo Library—lost in the campus crowd as I usually am and prefer to be—then returning to my one-bedroom apartment on Queen Anne Hill, crammed ceiling to floor with books, where each evening I fix myself a simple bachelor’s dinner and, while relaxing in my pajamas and slippers, study the newspaper or a few journals like Arion and Hellas (to which I contribute) through my large, round reading glasses, and then around midnight I at last turn in.

  Here is where the problem began.

  The long and short of it is that I could fall asleep easily enough, but only for a short time. After only two hours I was suddenly wide awake, staring into the darkness, as alert as if I’d drunk five cups of Starbucks coffee in a row, my mind chewing on all sorts of cultural and scientific conundrums—for example, I could not stop thinking about the Poincare Conjecture (the Clay Mathematics Institute will pay anyone $1 million if they solve it). I kept brooding on questions like, What does it mean that water has been discovered on Mars? Will the Human Genome Project lead to genetic engineering? What are dolphins saying to each other with all those clicks, whistles, barks, and screeches? Were they talking about us? Will the e-book replace paperback novels? And just what are the ingredients that make the gooey blob inside Lava Lamps bubble and burble the way it does?

  These sibyline mysteries, as you might guess, can keep an old-fashioned humanist awake until daybreak, pacing the floor and pulling at his hair, and that is exactly what I did. Without sleep, I felt like a fried egg all during my morning and afternoon seminars. I drumbled home to my apartment in a daze. I fell asleep—yes—but for only two hours once again. This purgatory went on for thirty days.

  By the eighth day I was desperate. There were puffy, dark pouches under my eyes. My sleep-deprived brain felt like one long smear along the inside of my skull. Yet I had not truly been awake for that past week. Time felt fibrous, each moment unlocked from the next. Sounds, as they came to me, were faint, yeasting in the distance, a pâté of noises that blurred into an indistinguishable hum. The world looked as if it shimmered behind a curtain of heat. Insomnia, as others have pointed out, is a kind of waking limbo, a dreamlike realm between the beta-wave state of wakefulness and the theta-wave state of deep sleep. And it is well-known, especially to men and women of science, that if one does not sleep, one will go mad. We need REMs—Rapid Eye Movements—during deep sleep for the brain’s electrical discharge of energy.

  Knowing all this only magnified my fears—and, therefore, my enervating inability to sleep. My physician sympathized, as doctors are supposed to do, and prescribed a new sleeping pill, Ambien, but I went through two bottles of that stuff, and I was still sleepless in Seattle. I tried drinking warm milk because it contained the amino acid tryptophan, which the body uses to manufacture serotonin, which plays a role in regulating sleep, but again, nothing! I tried alcohol, but that just left me hungover and awake. I went to the gymnasium on campus and rode the stationary bike for three hours, lifted weights, and did one hundred push-ups, all of which left my body feeling like a construction site, but still I didn’t sleep. I tried crossword puzzles and watching the History Channel until five A.M. I tried reading novels by Dean Koontz and Jacqueline Susann and Tom Clancy. I prayed, I took a hot bath, then began practicing yog
a and transcendental meditation. I tried acupuncture. At night, in bed, I listened to a device I ordered from a catalog, a little wooden box that played the sound of waterfalls and the sweep of ocean waves, like a lullaby, but all that running water just made me want to get up and go to the bathroom to relieve my bladder. I even took up the study of Sanskrit, hoping against all hope that all those declensions and the five hundred case endings for masculine, feminine and neuter nouns would surely put me to sleep. But with Sanskrit I discovered a language so lovely that I was thrilled to learn that in this ancient, melic tongue, the words for “ocean” were samudra and udadhi, the words for “moon” were chandra and indu, and so I found myself so fascinated and absorbed I was still awake at dawn (ushasa, in Sanskrit).