by John Raymond
“I’m not at the office right now, but when I go in, yeah, no problem . . .”
“Oh, no hurry. Anytime in the next day or two is great. Hey, are you at home right now? What time is it in L.A., anyway? Shit, it must be so late.”
“It’s kind of late,” Anne allowed.
“We don’t have to do this now.”
“No, no. Now is good.” Anne said, wishing she were able to help herself from letting Susan know what kind of suffering she was enduring, but she wasn’t that strong.
“Okay, well, let’s not keep you up too much longer. So, what did you need? I’ve got another panel in an hour. I should think about what I’m saying.”
Already, Anne could see Susan’s attention subdividing. She’d begun reading her email scroll alongside Anne’s face on the screen; the telltale darting of her eyes gave her away. And the brief tapping of her fingers on the keys came next, the trickle of sound floating into the microphone and across the globe.
Maybe this wasn’t the best time to make a pitch. Certainly, there was nothing Anne would have loved more than to say good night and climb into bed. But Anne knew that the success of her plan depended on a gradual, sidelong approach. And so, even though it was three in the morning and the only sound outside was an almost impossibly distant ambulance siren and her bed was only twenty feet away, she forced herself to slow down and claim all of Susan’s attention.
She began with a summary of the past few days at the office, giving Susan a microscopic account of the many meetings and phone calls and little administrative chores she’d been handling alone, all the unseen fires she’d been putting out. She plumped each episode into a catastrophe narrowly averted, and she was rewarded with a string of small gasps and murmurs of great appreciation and concern. Anne rarely made this kind of bid for sympathy, and she was glad to find Susan was taken in by it. But of course she was taken in. Susan was not crazy, after all. She was wholly loyal and compassionate as long as you dragged it out of her.
Gradually, in among the litany of labors and small-bore gossip, Anne slivered in news of her meetings with Charlie Arnold, so that by the end of the conversation, among the final summary bullet points, she was able to return to the subject of Charlie and casually mention the request that had motivated the whole performance in the first place: can we free up a hundred fifty grand for Charlie’s regional sustainability czar?
“Is he still on that trip?” Susan asked, perplexed. Her relationship with Charlie was a complicated blend of ideological affinity, personal competition, and mutual hunger for scarce civic resources. The idea of making a donation to Charlie’s pet project was not immediately enticing.
“We would share access to everything the new department generates. Charlie sees the position as like a lobbyist, PR agent, and pollster all in one. We’d all get the reports, and we’d all use the agency as a kind of in-house consultant. The point would be to create . . .” Not synergies—that sounded too canned, too stupid—but what, then? “Collaboration opportunities.”
Susan was barely listening anymore, shifting her attention back to the other windows of her screen. For all Anne’s gradual approach, Susan easily grasped the nature of the power grab before her. She was a professional politician, after all. She could see a quid pro quo sneaking from behind.
“Tell him we already have a communications director, thank you,” she said, tapping away. “I don’t really see the value add on our side. I assume this new guy lives in Charlie’s building, too, right? Sounds like we’d be paying for a new staff position in his world. Tell him thanks, but no thanks.”
“He did a survey last summer. Ninety-five percent of the public has never even heard of our bureau. Eighty percent of public employees have never heard of our bureau.”
“I don’t care about Charlie’s survey. As long as the mayor and the city council know about us, who cares? They’re the ones who approve our budget. We don’t need PR the way Charlie seems to think he does. Tell him to find another sugar mama. Honestly, he thinks we’ve got so much fat? It’s offensive.”
“I’m totally with you,” Anne said. “I agree, it’s all kind of ridiculous. But here’s another thing to think about, too, all right? Just as a thought.”
“What?”
Susan was on the verge of complete disengagement. The curtain of distraction was already lowering onto the stage, the pulleys squeaking, the heavy velveteen drapes sliding their cuffs across the boards. Anne took a deep breath, mentally donning her brightest tap-dancing shoes for one last shuffle before the crowd. If this last encore didn’t do the trick, her cause was lost.
“We still have that budget line for Vicki’s job,” she said, “We need to use it, or we won’t have it next budgeting cycle. One thought is, we could shift it over to Charlie’s position and then reevaluate the allocations next year.”
“We can’t keep Vicki’s salary in our budget otherwise? Seriously?”
“Use it or lose it, that’s the law,” Anne said, with much more confidence than her knowledge necessarily merited.
“There must be other ways to keep it.”
“Maybe. But I don’t know what they are. And this is right here.”
“Vicki’s salary is how much?”
“Almost eighty.”
“So we’re really talking about kicking in seventy above and beyond.”
Susan paused in her texting to stare into Anne’s aperture once again. She tightened her lips, manipulating the abacus in her mind.
“Okay,” she said. “Agreed. What else you got? We’ve got to get you into bed.”
Anne couldn’t sleep until five o’clock in the morning, her gut was churning so much over all the lies and half lies she’d been telling. She tried viewing them from every possible angle, seeking vulnerabilities, gaps, rationalizations, until finally the lies were like a barrel rolling in the water, not a single thought sticking anywhere. At some point she finally drifted off for two hours and dreamed feverishly about job interviews.
When she stepped out of the shower, there were two calls waiting. One was from Aaron, informing her that he and his grandpa were staying an extra night in Oakland. They’d run into some car trouble and were waiting for a piston to be replaced. Nothing to worry about; they were having a fine time, bonding in an intergenerational way.
The other call was from Temo, the Fijian caregiver with the illustrious résumé, and, seeing his name in her palm, her heart leapt. The message was short and mildly garbled, but the mere fact of its existence implied good news: surely his last client was either dead or almost dead and he would soon be available for a new detail. She didn’t even get dressed before she called him back and asked if he would meet her for coffee ASAP.
“Of course,” he said. His voice was calm and cheerful, lit with a lovely, sun-kissed accent, the voice of a mature, grounded human being. “Next week is quite open for me. And the week after that—”
“No, no, how about now?”
“You mean, this very moment? Today?”
“If possible. Yes.”
He chuckled and agreed. He had to be flattered that she was so eager to see him. Two hours later she was sitting at Urth, in Santa Monica, eating a granola parfait with a man from Fiji who might well become her new family.
Fijians, it turned out, were a dark-skinned, sturdy-looking people. At least this one was. She guessed Temo was about fifty-two years old. He had a wide, mature, sad face the color of maple syrup, and his body was thick and strapping but gently curvaceous, his wide chest framed by soft, sloping shoulders. His hands were large and soft and clean. Physically, he was exactly the handler an old, infirm person might need. Powerful yet gentle. Strong yet sensitive. Competent but not cynical. She’d been through a thousand racial-equity seminars and gave annually to the L.A. Anti-racist Alliance, but she was doing her best not to imagine him in a grass skirt.
Personality-wise, Temo seemed right, too. He was straightforward, simple, perhaps unimaginative, but definitely alert. He was not
an intellectual, not a wit, but possibly a deep, insightful thinker. Maybe the slightest hint of superiority was in there, too. Maybe a slight hint of theater to his sad eyes as he half smiled, almost pityingly, and refused her offer of coffee. He seemed precise, self-effacing, mildly superior, obviously a good person. Nothing about him caused her any doubt.
They talked about Fiji to start. He still had a wife there, he said, and he had a daughter in Germany, recently married to a private in the U.S. Army. His village was outside Sigatoka, on the southern coast. He loved Fiji very much, and he went back every year, bearing gifts for his relatives and their growing families. He’d built his mother and aunt homes in their village, good homes, strong enough to weather a tsunami. He had a home there himself, and someday he would go back to retire, but not anytime soon.
He’d been in the United States for ten years, he said, and about the question of his citizenship, he was slightly cagey. She did not push the issue. If Deep Throat didn’t care about Temo’s legal status, she didn’t care, either, and it wasn’t as if she were running for office or anything. They were all just people here, weren’t they? Ben was the only one who might have a problem, and he wasn’t around.
“It is a blessing. I am the luckiest man in the world, getting to share this time with my clients and their families.”
“That’s a wise way of seeing,” she said.
“It is how it is.”
It was the crucifix that sold her. Normally, she hated seeing crucifixes around people’s necks, these stupid, sanctimonious ornaments of someone’s private belief. What did God care if you advertised your creed? But on this day, sitting in this fragrant restaurant, surrounded by bearded men peering at laptops, pedicured mom triathletes with their pink smartphones and canvas totes, she was glad for the unfashionable statement of old-time belief. Maybe Temo was one of the good Christians. Maybe he took the Christian service ethos to heart. Maybe he was an honest-to-God lover of his fellow man. For some reason, against all evidence in the history of the world, she found the crucifix to be not a reminder of the Inquisition, as usual, but a signal this man wasn’t going to fuck her over.
They parted ways, promising to talk again in the coming few days. They hadn’t talked about money yet. The cost of his heart and hands was not going to be cheap. He was contracted on a monthly basis, and he lived in Encino, and his car needed repair. Sundays off for church. She wasn’t sure if his fee was negotiable, but she decided not to try talking him down at this moment. They had time for that.
Alone, she finished her parfait, an excellent confection of nutty, house-made granola and creamy, Greek-style yogurt. She refilled her coffee and scrolled through the messages of the past hour, enjoying a rare moment of calm.
With Temo at her dad’s side, helping him eat, helping him bathe, making his bed, driving him to the store, she would finally be free to relax and concentrate on all the other chores of life. With Temo in the house, she could get a decent night’s sleep. Maybe she could see a movie some night. Maybe she could even go on a date someday. Unthinkable.
She scanned the room, gauging the men as possible paramours. There were at least three that she would entertain. At least three she would allow to ravage her as long as they evaporated into smoke immediately thereafter. If, perchance, something was brewing with Mark, she should get in a few shags before the final threshold was crossed. For practice, if nothing else.
The feeling of great tranquillity and peace lasted approximately ten minutes. She was sliding her phone into her purse, wondering if the rumpled receipts had aged sufficiently to be discarded without a look, when a sudden, curdling intuition of wrongness entered into her heart region, clutching at her innards. The coffee in her mouth suddenly became bitter and strange. The corners of the table sharpened into deadly points. What had she done?
Here’s what: She’d just met a man named Temo from Fiji, and, after talking to him for all of about forty minutes, she’d hired him to tend her own father in the final, dying days of his life. She’d subcontracted her most sacred duty in life, barring the raising of her own son, to this . . . this . . . what? Who was this man, Temo? She had no idea. She’d barely understood numerous of his anecdotes, let alone checked out if anything he said was true. Meanwhile, her father, the flesh that had formed her, the fire that had sparked her, was counting his hours left on this earth. She’d decided, almost without deciding, that she would skip out on nursing his body from the world. She’d decided, without truly understanding the consequences, that the man who’d raised her, who’d endured the worst that humanity had ever devised, who deserved a king’s death, would die with a stranger.
She couldn’t breathe. What kind of person outsourced her own father’s death? She stumbled out of the café and down the stairs, holding on tightly to the handrail. The sun hit bleakly on the sidewalk, revealing every spot of oil and gum, every broken straw and bent bottle cap. In a flash, forty-five years of her father’s love—precious hours of him swaddling her as a baby, feeding her as a toddler, reading to her in bed, driving her, holding her, sending her to the best schools, not communicating much but never giving any inkling of doubt as to his devotion, his utter, unconditional love—filled her body. He’d given her everything he had, and she’d turned around and hired a ringer. All her father’s love burned in her throat, down to her intestines. The great test had come, and she was failing.
She walked past the car, not ready to seal herself into its shell, trying to calm down. Blurry figures passed by. Cars roared. She had arguments. No one would judge her for this. This was simply how society was organized now. The division of labor demanded this kind of transaction.
But since when was society the arbiter of the good? Had we developed so much freedom that we’d become free from responsibility itself? What was this life for, if not this? Who took care of Temo’s family?
She kept walking down the boardwalk, the long cement ribbon limning the edge of the continent. The sand was stomped with footprints, and the eye of God was on her. The heat of the sky was burning on her back, a hot hand on the nape of her neck. People traveled past her, forward and back, mumbling private incantations. She felt stuck in the old dreams of early motherhood. All those terrible dreams of misplacing Aaron in a store, losing him in a crowd. The horrible dream logic of looking and looking and never finding. Now the dream feeling had entered the waking life.
She passed the spot where the opening credits of Three’s Company had been filmed and descended into the dregs of Venice. The path became clogged with mangy hippies selling their pipes and papers, sweat-shellacked roller skaters, homeless children begging for drug money, each person more fried than the last. She walked farther, passing the aerosol paintings of Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix, the saints of American hedonism; the T-shirt emporiums, these swamps of bad taste. “The eight stages of tequila . . .” “Where’s my bong?” She entered a cloud of patchouli that seemed to cling to the air like tendrils of ivy.
She walked for fully half an hour without spotting a single person she could honestly talk to. The people were all so warped by their failed fantasies. They were future lizard kings, future shamans of rock and roll, nihilist punks, black hustlers, archetypal bums, all of humanity, none as terrible and selfish as she.
At a fish-and-chips shack, she turned and shuffled in the direction of the water, cresting a dune not far from the pier. The swell of sand was like the body of a giant, sleeping pig, she thought, and on the other side gray palms stood like sentinels guarding the tide. Beyond the trees was a gate to the endless expanse of salt water. She walked the plank of the pier toward the severe truth of the horizon.
She stared at the Pacific. Out there, she knew, under the water, the shit of a whole society once flowed. Torrents of warm piss, geysers of cornwater, chugging from some giant pipe into the briny depths. Through the clouds of waste swam sharks, octopi, jellyfish, lampreys, blind skates, bottom feeders of unimaginable shape and girth. Out there, under the thin glaze of silver light, eve
rything she could see, an ocean of shit.
20
Colonel Owen was not a war fighter. He may have been many other things—a creature of great beauty and dignity, the maintainer of closely cropped, ghost-gray hair, the owner of an astonishing, angular jaw and a fatless waist, the wearer of a pressed, fitted uniform—but he was not a war fighter.
He was a paper pusher, and in that, in a sense, he was a fighter. He was a fighter of the one, true, never-ending war within the armed forces—namely, the war for bureaucratic supremacy amid the executive class. Like many of the executive soldiers of his ilk, he’d pitched in during a few battles in Grenada or something, maybe sprayed a wall with bullets in Somalia, tagged along on a patrol or two in Sarejevo, and had then proceeded to spend the remainder of his career ensconced in the head shed, outflanking commission reports, strafing his competitors for promotions, capturing the affections of generals’ wives. The mission before him this morning was exactly within his skill set: the writing of an eloquent and ambiguously incendiary memo.
The forensic report presented to Colonel Owen in the presence of Ben was a tantalizing document, surely a puzzle worthy of many meetings and memoranda, maybe even the raw material for a whole suite of memos. Colonel Owen seemed to have a nearly sexual attraction to the report. And Ben had to admit, he was impressed by some of the deductions the report writers had made, though mostly just relieved that certain crucial elements of his activities had been plainly misunderstood. The investigators had discovered his shooting perch, of course—that was a simple line to draw—and they’d figured out his opossum trick, too. The pit had been uncovered merely hours after he’d fled, purged of forensic evidence, just as he’d intended. They’d also found his boat, which they understood to be a ruse.
But they’d also gotten some things wrong. They’d assumed the shooter was assisted by a getaway driver, for instance, unable to believe he could have crept out of their cordon on foot. They speculated he’d had a spotter, too, which made the search potentially for three people, a conspiracy. He was also pleased to learn that his shot had been as clean as he’d suspected. The news reports had been vague on that matter. But sure enough, the bullet had entered Holmes’s temple and deposited his brain on the geraniums as gently as a teacup onto a china saucer.
