by Jonathan Dee
He strolled down the hall and around the corner to the conference room, the last to arrive. Hadi didn’t even wait until he was in his seat to start talking.
“Got an idea to run past you,” Hadi said. “A town in Massachusetts called Westhaven, you know where that is? I didn’t know it, I had to look it up. Anyway, they’ve banned the sale of tobacco products within the town limits. It makes a lot of sense. I’m thinking of passing that ban here. What say you?”
They all stared at him, Waltz included. Maybe Waltz and Hadi had already discussed it, while Allerton was petulantly waiting in his office in order to be late. “Wow,” he said. “That’s a bold move.” He was trying frantically to game it out. His neighbors and constituents, he was certain, would turn on Hadi in an instant if this ban were passed, and so he felt a strong desire to pass it. His own vote would be enough to do so; but then, if he voted for it, he’d be associated with it too. His path would be easy if he knew Waltz would vote yes, but Waltz would never vote for such a ban in a million years. The man smoked like a furnace, for one thing. And he was too dumb to be persuaded by any kind of Machiavellian argument about the long-game wisdom of passing a law that would adversely affect their superior whom they wanted to unseat. Besides, he wasn’t completely sure unseating Hadi was Waltz’s goal. Not because Waltz liked him—they had way too little in common for that—but simply because Hadi’s governing style, lazy and autocratic at the same time, made the other selectmen’s jobs so much less demanding.
“Maybe bring it to the next town meeting?” Allerton said finally. “People will want to hear your thinking.”
And then came the moment when Allerton realized that he’d been even more right about Hadi all along than he realized, that all his worst, most ungenerous instincts in the matter of human nature were always to be obeyed.
“I don’t think I’ll do that,” Hadi said. “Let’s just pass it in session. I don’t think a lot of opinions, people’s opinions, on an issue like this are going to be all that productive.”
“No?” Tom said.
Hadi shook his head and smiled. “Consensus really isn’t all it’s cracked up to be,” he said. “This is what I felt going in. And I think our results these last few years have borne that out, don’t you? If you let everybody vote on everything, some really destructive compromises and half measures are going to come out of that.”
Allerton looked at Waltz to see if they’d both just heard the same thing, but Waltz wore the look he always wore, a look that said he longed only for this meeting, like every meeting, to be over. As for the secretary, pen stilled by the momentary silence, she probably would have made an outstanding Nazi.
“I have to point out something obvious,” Allerton said, “which is that your lack of interest in popular resistance itself creates popular resistance. I know, for instance, that there’s a popular local blog dedicated to opposing, well, you. I heard someone in town referencing it just the other day.”
“Anonymous,” Hadi said. “I’ve seen it.”
Waltz’s interest was stirred. “Do you know who it is?” he said.
“No,” said Allerton a little more dramatically than he meant to, “I do not.”
“I’m concerned with the real,” Hadi said, “and blogs are what God gave the world to keep morons occupied. So can we leave it, then, that we’ll vote on this measure when we reconvene in a week?”
“Awesome,” Waltz said. Allerton nodded, just to acknowledge that he’d heard, and walked back to his rear-facing office and closed the door. His strength, he’d always felt, was that he wasn’t an especially political guy. Political in the sense of ideology, that is, Republican or Democrat, conservative or liberal. But that didn’t mean he had no core. On the contrary: he was a man and he expected to be treated like a man. Maybe that little toady real estate salesman, Firth, was onto something. They were under attack; and the way to come together was to refuse to be herded together. The best way to protect each other was to make sure everyone was free to make whatever stupid fucking selfish decision they wanted. He didn’t smoke but he felt like taking it up just to prove a point.
Still, he had to be smart about it. The Town of Howland kept a database with all its citizens’ vital statistics and contact information; Allerton copied Gerry Firth’s phone number onto a Post-it he stuck in his wallet, and that night, from home, he called it. “I thought about our talk the other day,” he said, “and I have to let you know something. Hadi not only knows about your blog, he knows who you are, he knows you’re the author. Don’t ask me how, I have no idea how, and I’ll bet you don’t either. But anyway, he sees you, he knows you’re out there, so there doesn’t seem any reason for anonymity anymore. Not to mention that I think the people need a leader. The opposition to Hadi needs a face. Because there is a battle coming. Let me tell you what we heard in the board meeting today.” And he briefly outlined the proposed plan to ban the sale of cigarettes and all other tobacco products in the town of Howland.
—
Gerry hung up. It was a Tuesday, which meant it was a Penny night. His instinct was to try to keep from her what was on his mind, but whether or not that instinct was a gallant one, he couldn’t obey it, the weight of it was too much. She cleared their plates from her kitchen table and lit a cigarette and asked him what was wrong.
“Remember that blog I told you about?” he said. “What did you think about the fact that it was anonymous?” She cocked her head at him. “I mean,” he said, “did you think that was, like, cowardly or anything?”
“I never really gave that much thought to it,” she said.
“I’m trying—I’m trying to do the right thing,” Gerry said, twisting his napkin, “and if I’m honest with myself I’m trying to find the thing that will make you respect me more, that will make you let me into your life a little more. Is that stupid?”
She shook her head no, but apart from that her face showed nothing.
“Maybe you think it’s pathetic not to stand up for what you believe in. Maybe you think it’s pathetic for a man to just take potshots without identifying himself, while the world goes to hell around him. Maybe that’s why you won’t let me meet your sons. That’s kind of how I’m thinking.”
She sighed, and then patiently worked her way to the end of the cigarette before stubbing it out. Then she put that hand on his hand.
“Not really sure what the hell you’re talking about?” she said. “But listen, just so you know: I made myself a promise. No more men in the boys’ lives, at least until they become men themselves and I can’t do anything more about it. It’s got nothing at all to do with you. Or with hating men, for that matter. It’s I don’t trust my own judgment of who’s a good guy and who’s not. Historically you would have to say that my judgment on that is terrible, and my sons have already paid enough of a price for it. So the fact that you seem like a good guy to me is actually something of a red flag, you see what I mean?”
He spent the night, and when she went to work the next morning he drove home, made a pot of coffee, tapped the space bar on his keyboard, and waited for the light of the monitor to bathe his face. He kept it short and sweet: he described the proposed ban on tobacco-product sales in Howland, and then he identified himself as Gerald Firth, born and raised in the South Berkshires, and called for a petition to hold a vote to recall Philip Hadi as First Selectman. He didn’t trouble himself with the question of whether the town’s charter had any sort of provision for recall votes. He was more worried about the fact that it had been nearly a year since his last post; his followers, however many of them there were, had likely wandered off, and so perhaps he was speaking to no one.
—
He did still have Allerton’s cell number in his phone, from yesterday’s call; he left a voicemail. Allerton listened to it in his office after lunch and then frantically deleted it. He waited until he got home to look up the Workingman’s Dread blog and read the new post. He read it again to make sure it contained no reference to h
im or mention of his name. Not since high school, probably, had he so successfully maneuvered someone else into doing something risky that he wanted them to do. He felt like he’d missed his calling, though he wasn’t sure what that calling was. In the morning, at Town Hall, he called up that citizens’ database again and spent the day copying by hand all six hundred–plus email addresses, every taxpayer and property owner in town except for the handful of seniors and technophobes who weren’t online. He carried the addresses home with him; after dinner, he set up a brand new Gmail account and spent the hours until dawn typing every one of those addresses into the Bcc bar of a new message containing a link to Gerry Firth’s blog. When he heard his wife moving around in the kitchen, making coffee, he hit Send. He’d done everything he could think of to keep his involvement hidden, but still he thought it likely that it would all be traced back to him somehow in the end. He was no computer expert. He’d read that nothing was really private on the internet, nothing was truly deleted, everything you did or wrote or even looked at left a digital trail right back to you, and it was precisely because he didn’t understand how any of that worked that he believed it.
Gerry himself was slow to realize what had happened; when he saw in his inbox that someone had anonymously forwarded him a link to his own blog, his first thought was that someone had blown his cover as its author. Then he remembered that he himself had taken care of that. He sat in his desk chair, drinking a cup of microwaved coffee from that morning, and thought. Then he went online and checked the posting there. A hundred and twenty-two hits. He hit Refresh and the number went to 124.
The comments section, which had never before hit double digits, was now at twenty-eight, but a lot of those, he was disappointed to see, were negative—taking him to task either for thinking that anyone in town would care what he had to say or for spamming up their inbox without permission. They all assumed he’d forwarded the link himself, even though it made no sense that he’d do so anonymously just to distribute a post where he dropped his anonymity. “Where did you get my private email address?” was a common theme. It was depressing and hurtful. Some of the people telling him to shut up and mind his own fucking business used their real names too.
Then emails began dropping into his inbox, and one of the first was from his brother Mark. Can I ask you, Mark wrote, what the fuck you think you’re doing?
—
He drove over to Mark’s house after dinner. Haley was still up, and for whatever reason Mark didn’t want Karen to overhear them, so they took a couple of beers and walked down the porch steps out onto the lawn, even though the temperature had dropped into the forties. Hadi’s house, with its security lights, shone through the trees like a prison yard.
“What have you done to us?” Mark said.
“How do you mean?”
“How do I mean? Well, first off, just from the point of view of self-interest, is it a great idea for our business to come out and make an enemy of the guy who runs the town? Why would you do that? How do you imagine that’s going to be good for us?”
“I didn’t imagine—”
“And second, and maybe more to the point, who gives a fuck what you think about him anyway? What do you know about the politics of the town, about politics period? What gives you the right to, to…”
“What gives me the right?”
“You’ve always been like this,” Mark said, almost in a hiss, to avoid being heard inside. “You’ve always had some idea about yourself, like you’re the great rebel, the unappreciated genius. But you’re not. You’re a fuckup. A fuckup with a persecution complex. You think you know so much more than you know. And now you’re going to fuck this up too.”
There was a tremor in his voice as he said all this, almost as if he might be about to cry, and Gerry could feel more than anything else how afraid his brother was, how panicked.
“I’m glad it’s all coming out,” Gerry said softly. “That’s all I wanted, really. An end to happy talk. Everything out in the open.”
“You haven’t even lived in Howland all that long. You moved here after I did. What makes you the, the guardian of it? Your problem is that you can’t trust anybody, you can’t believe in anything. You can’t believe that this guy might actually just be the guy he says he is, because if there really are guys like that in the world and you aren’t one of them, then what does that make you?”
It was too dark now to see Mark’s face very well. Just the lights burning in the windows of Hadi’s house in front of them, and Mark’s lights behind them. Gerry had rarely seen his brother like this, though when they were kids he had often wanted to see it, dreamed of it, worked hard to provoke it. But now he didn’t feel any great satisfaction. People really showed themselves when you threatened their beliefs.
“I guess now is a good time to bring up something else,” Gerry said. “I’ve grown uncomfortable with this business, with what we do, you and I. I don’t think it’s honest.”
“Oh, you don’t? What’s—”
“Well, no, that’s the wrong word. Not ‘honest.’ ‘Honorable.’ It’s too dependent on the government, for one thing. Anyway, I want out.”
“That’s totally fine,” Mark said. “You’re a liability to me now anyway. The only reason you’re part of it in the first place is that I thought I was doing something generous for you, something to help you out when you had nothing. But of course I get zero credit for that. Instead I have to apologize for making you feel dirty. Well, my bad for expecting anything different in this fucking family.”
“You don’t have to apologize for anything,” Gerry said. “You just have to buy out my current share in the business.”
“That is totally not a problem,” Mark said.
It was actually a little bit of a problem, in terms of cash on hand, but Mark did it anyway; he could hardly go back to Gerry after that conversation and ask for more time. After some painful deliberation he decided he would have to warn Karen that their account balances would be temporarily low; it would lead to an unpleasant conversation, but the conversation that would ensue if she unwittingly bounced a check somewhere in town would certainly have been worse.
“So now it’s just you?” she said, not unkindly, but he didn’t like her saying it at all.
“It was always just me, really,” he said.
“What will we do about money?”
“This alters the timetable a little, in terms of selling off some of our holdings. But it has to be done, so I’ll do it. And also, in the short term, we have your salary.” He said that because he thought it would make her feel better—more involved, more empowered—but it didn’t seem to have that effect, judging by her face and by the fact that she didn’t speak to him for the rest of the morning.
—
The comment thread on Workingman’s Dread was now far longer than the final post itself. A number of commenters asked, often quite rudely, where was this recall petition Gerry was on about? Why no link to it? He didn’t post again but he inserted his own comment, linking to a simple petition to which people could attach their names. Very few did, even though he’d left the grounds for Hadi’s recall purposefully vague. Part of the reason for that was that he sensed there were now actual, legal considerations involved, which he hadn’t fully researched. He intended to ask Tom Allerton for some help with that aspect of the effort before composing the petition, but Allerton, for whatever reason, was not returning Gerry’s voicemails, even though Gerry was careful enough to call his cell and not his Town Hall office.
Not even a dozen virtual signatures. Upwards of two hundred comments on the post itself. Gerry was disappointed. People really did not like to put their names on the line. Which made him feel foolish and sullen for having done exactly that.
—
Some of the names he didn’t recognize, which might have meant that they were fake. Penny’s name was not on there. He was afraid to discuss it with her. He assumed that she knew about it, that she’d been part of the orig
inal email blast, since she was a property owner, and a taxpayer.
He felt people’s eyes on him when he went into town, felt them talking about him in his wake. So he pretty much stopped going. Even the Ship wasn’t that comfortable a place anymore. It was easy to do his rudimentary food or liquor shopping a few miles away, in Stockbridge or Great Barrington, where he was nobody and his name meant nothing. One afternoon he came back from the Price Chopper and someone had written SHUT THE FUCK UP in brightly colored chalk on the cracked asphalt of his driveway. He hosed it off and never said a word about it, to anyone, but it didn’t matter, something was in the air.
—
A week later, Mark was in his living room watching a documentary about K2 when faint, revolving lights, so faint as to be shadows, started washing across the wall behind the TV. He couldn’t figure out where they were coming from.
He opened his front door and saw the same lights flickering on the underside of the leaves, above the ryegrass that bordered his lawn. All was silent, except for the wind, as he walked toward the woods. Maybe kids had taken up some kind of residence in there? He’d heard stories—everyone in town had—about groups of local kids who met up in the woods and drank and took drugs and broke into people’s houses. As he crossed the tree line and parted the branches Mark heard the sharp electronic crackle of a two-way radio, and then he saw the lights more clearly: there was a police cruiser parked in Hadi’s driveway. Rather than turn back, get his car keys, and drive over there, Mark just pushed on through the woods, a route he’d never taken before, following the silent, revolving light.
