The Deep Whatsis

by Peter Mattei

  “Do what?”

  “Maybe you should take the money and use if for something else. Go to school.”

  “And study what?”

  “I dunno, man,” I say, this is new ground we’re on. I pretend to scratch my head as an indication that I’m thinking out loud, and of earnestness. “Maybe herbal medicine or something? Midwifery? Or go to law school, become a community organizer? You know. Fight the power?”

  He looks at me for a long time, like he can’t tell if I am joking or not.

  “Don’t be an asshole,” he says.

  And then changing tone I say, “Just get in the car. I mean it.” He stands there for a second and I can tell he still doesn’t want to go inside but he’s looking for an excuse so I lean over and unlatch the passenger-side door and throw it open. He takes this as a good enough cue and gets back in the car and we sit there for a moment in utter silence. Then I take him home.

  3.24

  A few days later I have to return to the Tate offices in order to sign my severance papers; I get six months of pay and a year of benefits but because I breached my contract with an HR violation, they’re giving me half that. Not bad. I take the subway to Thirty-fourth and walk to the Tate Worldwide building, panopticon of shame. I go to the benefits department and meet with a woman I had never seen before, her name is Angeline. I sign a bunch of papers without reading any of them and I go. No one greets me, no one notices me, no one says hello; this is my legacy after two years of toil. While I’m with Angeline I ask to use her phone and I dial Barry’s number. He doesn’t take my call. I dial HR Lady’s number and she doesn’t answer; I leave her a long message asking her if she got my e-mail or my fax or my text about compensating the people we fired with the bonus I was going to get and the one she surely will, about how is it people like us get seduced by this system, and how it’s a shame but I always felt there was something between us, unspoken, and in different circumstances we might have meant something to each other. Then the voice cuts me off and asks me if I am satisfied with my message and I press 2: no. No, I am not satisfied with my message.

  As I’m coming out of the building I see Henry Graham, my ex-colleague, lingering there across the street. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t see me and so I have a few seconds to decide do I turn around in order to avoid him, do I keep going in order to avoid him, but then it’s too late, he’s right in front of me and looking right at me. I stop and smile at him and offer my hand. He doesn’t take it.

  “Henry,” I say, shifting gears, “how are you?”

  “Not bad, you?” he says. I keep my distance, thinking that if I were him I’d be punching me in the face now. But then I realize that a man in need of work doesn’t entertain such thoughts around his former boss.

  “I was going to e-mail you,” I say, “but they shut off my account. I wanted to tell you that, um, it was pretty shitty what went on there and I’m, um, sorry about what happened.”

  “Oh sure, man,” he says half-heartedly.

  “They fired me, too, you know,” I tell him. “Just a few days ago.” Is this what a human would say? It occurs to me that it might be.

  “Yeah, I saw that on Agency Spy,” he says. I look down at his feet and see that he has bought some new John Fluevog boots: it’s possible the man is trying to youngify himself. It’s also possible he has begun to dye his hair, I can’t quite tell in this light.

  “How’s it look out there?” I ask him, thinking that as out-of-work creatives we share something.

  “Tough market, you know,” he says with a shrug. “Tough market.” I shrug back and we share a laugh, or should I say that I laugh in the hope he will join me.

  “If I hear of anything, I’ll let you know,” I go. Still he says nothing. Then I ask him if he wants to have lunch.

  “Now?” he says, looking at his watch.

  “Why not?” I say. “On me.”

  I stand there and wait for him to answer. He looks around as if he’s expecting to see someone he knows on the street, but he doesn’t, and then smiles, more to himself than for my benefit, it seems to me. He grunts a strange kind of anxious grunt under his breath. Then he looks at me and I think he’s going to say something, he’s breathing in as if in anticipation of speaking, and then I see his hand go into his pocket and emerge holding what looks, for a second, like a gun, and I realize a nanomoment later something very interesting: it is a gun. A Beretta Tomcat Small Caliber Tip Out with a snag-proof design that permits quick presentation I was later told.

  He’s shaking it as he presents it at me.

  “Henry,” I say. “What are you doing?” I laugh the laugh of someone who doesn’t fully believe he is standing in front of a desperate man holding a gun.

  “Fuck you, Eric,” he says. “You’re a cunt.”

  “I know,” I say. “I know that. Everybody knows that. Let’s go eat.”

  For a moment I think it’s worked, that he’s going to put the gun away, or that I had only imagined it, that he never had a gun, that it was a phone.

  But then he pulls the trigger of the gun and the trigger slams against the charge and the charge explodes in the narrow barrel, sending the necked-down Hornady V-Max .17 cartridge hurtling toward me. The tiny armor strikes me in the right side of my shoulder and I am knocked back a few feet but not to the ground.

  A second explosion occurs and I feel nothing; this could be explained by the possibility that the bullet has hit me in the face and blown my head apart before I had a chance to feel it, but this is not the case: I feel nothing because he missed. Although there is a ringing in my ears.

  Then he fires again, the third time being charmlike as the V-Max strikes me to the left of my solar plexus, a good hit, and as I am falling down and Henry Graham is running off down the sidewalk, people are scattering. My head hits the pavement and I black out.

  I black out for what I later construe to be ten or eleven seconds; when I come to and look around, Henry is gone and there are people screaming and asking me if I am alive and then there are sirens, and cops, more screaming, more sirens, an EMS guy wearing plastic gloves that make him look like he works at a food truck, and then I’m moving, there are doors, hallways, men in blue shirts asking me questions, men with white masks talking to each other, needles, tubes, and very very bright lights.

  3.25

  One of the advantages of the midcentury modernist aesthetic is it’s easy to pack up your things when you need to relocate, especially when you don’t have any things. My moving company, called Green Transitions, is the first environmentally conscious moving company in New York (our boxes are made from recycled bamboo byproducts and our trucks run on bio fuels). As it happened, the first of Henry’s tiny bullets had entered my shoulder muscle, luckily avoiding my humerus, scapula, and subscapularis, and exited cleanly out the back in a straight shot. The second hit above my abdomen, perforating the mesentery connecting my inferior vena cava to my small intestine, taking a sharp right and exiting without touching my spine, liver, or anything else of major value. Some call it a miracle. I call it a very informative eight days at New York Presbyterian followed by two weeks in bed watching every Preston Sturges film there is on DVD, twice, I found his oeuvre quite compelling, it had been strongly recommended to me as therapeutic by Seth. “His approach to comedy is somewhat Buddhist,” Seth informed me as we watched The Great McGinty, “seeing as how he refers to life as a ‘cockeyed caravan,’ which can be thought of as another term for samsara.”

  “Cool,” I said. “Let’s watch that one again.”

  Seth, carless and jobless, had gotten back together with his girlfriend, the one he thought was breaking up with him, and they told me they were starting this Etsy business together selling handmade hemp yoga mats, although they might have been joking, I couldn’t tell.

  Apart from a couple of visits from the two of them, and various food delivery people, and a few messages traded back and forth with my father, I didn’t really talk to anyone, I wasn’t after all in
much of a social mood.

  And then, finally, toward the end of week two, I got a series of texts pinging me in succession; they were from someone called BLOCKED.

  OMFFFG!!?!!

  i just heard about it i didnt do it i sware!! hope you are

  OK.

  btw: *totally random violence* = so u;),

  but I wnted to say sorrysorry

  eric

  sorry i ran away @ the beach but you just didn’t

  know the truth was i was fuck I was lying LYING

  the whole time i was OMG am i telling u this? it was

  tom

  tom b who I met at the edit house who said i could

  have a job if i f*ckd with your hed and at first

  i did it because i just wanted to and

  i am stupid and week and then I saw you and you

  seemd so kewt and sad and everything hppened how

  it did and then

  i didnt know what to do i wanted to tell u

  but then u told me u lovd me and so i ran awaay

  i am sorry realy sorry that i did it and that i puked on

  your house but i drank too music I mean too much

  i love you *too* but too late for anything like that i know.

  dont be hater - or do.… bye.…

  crying…….

  (>_<)

  I didn’t text her back right away but then when I finally did (Sabi! call me!) I realized I didn’t know you could block a cell phone but apparently you can and so therefore I had no idea if my response even got to her, so I sent it again (r u kidding me? call me!!) and then a third time (pleez?!?) but received nothing in reply. I tried her old number but it was out of service. Had she moved? I didn’t know. I tried locating her on Facebook but she had told me she wasn’t even on Facebook and besides, I didn’t know her last name. So I watched movies and waited, and waited some more, and then one day I realized I could put my pants on without feeling like someone was stabbing me.

  The last of my furniture is being taken into the freight elevator and the Green Transitions Relocation Team is loading it all into the truck. There are still two months left on my lease and I wasn’t able to negotiate an early termination agreement to my liking so I’m just going to have to pay and leave the place empty. Now that everything is gone—I put the little cactus into my Rimowa suitcase last—I look out the east-facing windows at the skyline of Manhattan for a moment or two, it seems like the right thing to do as a sign-off. I count four private helicopters hovering above the East River; I take this as a sign that the economy is improving, but not for everyone.

  For some reason I don’t want to go, not just yet.

  I have the rest of the afternoon free and consider paying Dr. Look a visit before I go, perhaps to discuss the feelings that I’m having about Sabine and her sudden and not completely surprising admission—I knew there was something weird about Tom—but otherwise I must admit it took me by surprise to have been played like that. Or perhaps I should just explain to Look that the story about my mom was fiction, the lie that tells the truth as it were, and that there are other stories I could have told him, that I could still tell. Then I dig out the card he gave me, it was in a folder of so-called important papers. I dial and a shrill voice tells me the number is out of service, please hang up and try again. I drop his card in the toilet and empty the last of my Xanax, Klonopin, Adderall, OxyContin, Percocet, Ativan, Zoloft, Wellbutrin, and Advil into the bowl and I flush. Then I grab my 1960s airline travel bag updated in Vachetta leather by Rag & Bone, consider turning off the bathroom light as I leave but don’t, and walk out into the hallway where the elevators are. My phone rings and I can see by the 212 number it’s the police precinct calling yet again; I had told them ad infinitum that I didn’t get a good look at my assailant and couldn’t even tell what race he was, or how tall, or what he was wearing, or if he was a woman, but something about my fabrication must have seemed to them like a lie because they keep persisting in questioning me about it. I decline the call for the very last time and head out of the building named Krave.

  3.26

  It’s still raining as I drive west in the Range Rover. I left the city via the Holland Tunnel and picked up Interstate 80 in New Jersey off the turnpike, and that’s when the rain started, in drizzly fits at first and then the sky was reduced to a smudge and the water came in long wailing bursts from all sides. The interstate’s a more-or-less straight shot all the way to Chicago from here. Just past the Water Gap, in a town I see is called Bartonsville, PA, I stop for gas and check in with my device; no messages. My original thought was to drive all the way to Chicago in one very long day and night but the weather is slowing me down so around 6 PM I am still in central Ohio; soon I will be coming up on the Youngstown exit. My father had finally unloaded our childhood home a few years ago after he lost his shirt in the crash and moved to Florida. I decide it was only fitting, since I was going that way anyway, that I spend the night in the vicinity of where I grew up. And why push it? I had told my new employers at Draftfcb, where I will soon be one of two Executive Creative Directors on the Walmart account, that I wouldn’t start until next week, so arriving a day later won’t really make any difference to anyone. I’ve actually been to Chicago only once, not counting the times I’ve changed planes at O’Hare; I found it a charming if somewhat sleepy town. Draft is badly in need of a reboot and they had been bugging my headhunter Lynette for some time; after some wrangling I accepted the offer, promising to myself that this would be my last gig in the ad biz.

  I pull off and get a room at the Quality Inn & Suites, it’s only $59.99 a night. Not far down the access road is an Olive Garden Restaurant and I have a chef’s salad, which was really nothing more than rolled up luncheon meats and four kinds of grated cheese in a creamy cheese-based dressing; I think if I looked hard I’d find some irradiated lettuce in there somewhere. I’m looking forward to getting to the Windy City and the interim corporate apartment they’ve got waiting for me in the River North section of town. After dinner I decide to drive around; Youngstown was a bustling working-class city not that long ago, a tree-lined paradise ringed with factories that made shoes and steel and, as I was intimately aware, the solenoids that went inside automobile fuel pumps. But this was back when we built things that people needed and used, things that had weight, things whose purpose was not just the enabling of fantasies, like Day-Glo NASCAR beer koozies, and those are made in Guangdong Province anyway (tagline: WE MAKE REALITY THE MENTAL IDEAS YOU DO NOT KNOW YOU DREAM OF BUT NEED FROM THE SADNESS).

  It’s still light and instead of going into Youngstown I find myself driving west along Route 62, which when I was a child was a country road but now is lined with golf courses and hastily constructed strip malls featuring ninety-nine and ninety-eight-cent stores. Canfield is a small Ohio town that quickly became a suburb; the influx of southern blacks to Youngstown in the 1950s, because of the prevalence of factory jobs, created the need for a de facto whites-only enclave, and this is it. I remember the feeder streets well enough to find our subdivision, which is called Forest Green Estates and had been carved, ironically, from what had indeed been a forest but now the landscape has been rendered almost entirely devoid of natural vegetation. Each of the streets is named after a kind of tree or shrub, some of which even existed at one time in the area; our street was called Briarwood Lane. I turn right onto Bentwillow then left on Timber and then right on Briarwood and drive slowly because I can’t remember exactly what the number was. Was it 84412 or was it 48812? Or something else entirely? I get to the end of Briarwood, where it meets Chaucer (is that a tree? who knew?), and realize I have the numbers wrong and I must have driven past the place. I turn around (the RR’s turning radius is impressive) and head back, going slower this time, and then I recognize a house, or part of a house, the Mannings’ house, our former next-door neighbors. I say part of a house because it wasn’t really the Mannings’ house anymore, it was the Mannings’ house transformed on steroids, as two ma
ssive, oatmeal wings had been added to each side, and in the middle a vaulted ceiling had been grafted onto what once was the main part of the house, the whole concoction looking like an absurd half-finished mistake, something out of a graphic novel about the dystopian future. A sign on the lawn said the mutant home was for sale, and the chain and padlock on the front door indicated the bank had gotten involved and foreclosed on the whole atrocity midstream. To the left of the Mannings’s ex-house there was an empty, muddy lot, actually an enormous muddy hole in the middle of an empty, muddy lot, and the hole was filled with brown, oily water. It wasn’t square as it would have been if they were building a new home; the hole was kidney-shaped and long like a swimming pool, a swimming pool that was never finished, never filled in at last with cement, water, and joy. As I’m thinking this I look up and down the street, trying to picture my father there dealing with our dog, Race, on the day he was hit, and I realize that this empty hole is in fact where our house had stood, right there above that stagnant water. Our house was gone. Whoever it was who had bought the Mannings’ place had bought ours, too, and had torn it down to make room for a pool, and then they had given up on the pool, and the renovation, if not a host of other dreams.

  As it gets dark I decide to drive into Youngstown proper, as I haven’t been back here since my father left, and see what else has changed. By the time I snake my way north and east through the bad neighborhoods and into the center of town, it’s getting dark and I’m a little uncomfortable driving this kind of a car around here; although, getting carjacked by some tweaker on my way to a new job would be kind of poetic. As a kid we rarely came to town, apart from the occasional visit to my father’s plant, which was several miles to the east, and it’s like I’m seeing it for the first time. I cruise along Federal Street, which is the main drag, and nothing is open; I can’t tell if this is a part of Youngstown on the way up or on the way down. I find a bar, a tavern on a corner, called the Brick House, and I park and go in. There’s a handful of drunks and some other unsavory characters in there, an interesting cross between potheads and unemployed steelworkers, and a jukebox is alternating between old Slim Shady, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and Toby Keith.