Interference & Other Stories

by Richard Hoffman

  The people were once again looking around to see who had responded to the artist’s question, but Pursnipov was going right on, so they quickly turned their attention back to the stage. “Throw in a complication at the end, in the final hour, and never, ever, question whether the company of those who live on the mountaintop, whose castle draws our hero like a magnet, are worth the trip.

  “Not that it would matter if you did—that’s just another way of telling the story. Gives it legs. You can throw in that alternate ending from time to time, but not too often. I mean, you can say at the end that it isn’t worth the struggle and that the people at the top are vile, but the story’s already done its work. Adrenaline has flowed. The ear has heard the music. The imagination is engaged. Sure as a certain rhythm gets your toe to tapping, you’ve been seduced again by god and now you’ll listen even more attentively the next time, wondering which twist comes at the end. You’re trapped. But maybe not so easily from now on. Maybe you’ll hold out for a new story, a better one. If so, I shall be gratified, and proud if I have helped you see a way out of the usual darkness.”

  He disappeared from view for a moment, stood drinking a glass of water, disappeared to replace the glass under the podium, then stood looking at them for a long moment before he continued.

  “So, that’s the first story. Call it the dominant story. So I guess we can call this the recessive story. Yes, like genes on a strand. Like DNA. I can tell by the looks on some of your faces you already know what I’m going to say. I know you don’t want to hear this, but bear with me. That only goes to prove my point, don’t you think?

  “The other story I won’t tell, that you want me to tell, that you think that you need me to tell, is the one where—call it the Samson story—call it the Robin Hood story—the one in which our hero Manuel—here we might call him Emmanuel—redeemer, savior, one who comes to set things right, redress all wrongs, reset the switches, and establish harmony on the far side of justice, in short, to give the castle dwellers their comeuppance—does his famous stuff. He brings the house down, to turn a phrase, because he has never forgotten his roots, and because he refuses to participate in the oppression and exploitation he cannot manage to keep from seeing, hard as he tries.

  “There’s a good opportunity for a back story here, about lovers parted and rejoined.”

  Suddenly, he leaned far out over the podium with his hand to his ear again.

  “What’s that? What’s that? That’s right! I see you’re getting in the spirit of this!” He pointed somewhere midway and to the left in the crowd, but no one was ever sure who he had pointed to. “Did you hear what she said? She said the hero, Emmanuel, has a girlfriend! That’s right, a girlfriend from the old neighborhood who reminds him of the world he comes from. The memory, or maybe the possibility, of her love pushes him to a crisis of conscience. But now it’s not a question of returning, of turning away from the life at the castle. It’s a fierce moral struggle now! He sees the enslavement of his own people and his rage at this injustice brings him to turn against the castle dwellers.

  “Maybe you double up the lovey-dovey stuff by giving him another girlfriend at the castle, someone he has fallen for on his way up the mountain, someone he has to spare when it all blows up.

  “Be honest. Do you really want to hear that one again?”

  All was quiet.

  “Oh shit. You do. Of course. 1 told you to be honest and you were.

  “But the stories we need are different from the stories we want. Maybe Manny is a storyteller now. Not to be self-serving, but maybe that’s what it means to be a hero these days. Maybe all he can do is try out stories that make us less fearful, stories that change what we want. Maybe Manny is Manuela. Maybe Manuela is a kind of Cassandra. Maybe she tells the stories she does in the hopes that no one will have to live them. Maybe that’s why she tells you what you don’t want to hear. Maybe she is Maria, from Mare, the sea, Mnemosyne, the salty memory, the mother of the muses, life-giving, moon-dancing bath of beginning.

  “Never underestimate how shrewd a storyteller she is. No matter where she might take you, her every story begins the same way: ‘Once upon a time, a child was born.’”

  Here the maestro ducked and retrieved his water glass. All eyes were upon him as he drank deeply. Then he ducked down as if to replace the glass, but this time he never stood up again. The people waited, confused, until a man in the first row, deeply concerned for the artist, hopped up on stage to find no one there at all.

  “He’s over there!” someone shouted as Pursnipov climbed into the car driven by his caped escort. The car sped off only moments ahead of the first cries from the men discovering their wallets gone, and the women with their empty purses.

  GUY GOES UP TO THE PEARLY GATES

  He looks around for a fancy ironwork gate set in maybe pink marble among billowing clouds—he knows it’s idiotic, but he can’t help himself; it’s not that he expected it to be that way, really, but what soon comes into focus is hard to believe: three men in uniforms, one behind a desk and two on either side of what looks for all the world like a metal detector. They’re all three in blue pants, white shirts, wearing peaked caps with shiny black bills. The one at the desk with the epaulets and the gold braid on his cap is him: PETER, it says on the brass identification bar over his left breast pocket.

  “You ready?” says St. Peter.

  “Pardon me?”

  “Perhaps,” says St. Peter. He begins turning the pages of a book as big as the one that Guy’s Uncle Louie used to lug around of his wallpaper samples when he was in the decorating business.

  “We see it all from here, of course. A guy like you,” St. Peter says, “Come on, tell the truth, a guy like you, a guy like you named Guy”—and here he looks right and left at the other two and rolls his eyes—“he’s sort of a man’s man. Would you say that about yourself? That you’re kind of a guy guy, Guy?”

  Guy tries to shrug, but nothing happens. The saint laughs. “We see that all the time. Don’t be offended, I’m not laughing at you. It’s just that here we can’t do that, shrug. It’s endearing, actually, but here we deal in consequence, so shrugging is out of the question. Says here you have two children. Boys”

  “Yes. Yes sir. They’re fine boys. Were. Are. I’m sorry, I’m confused.”

  “And what did you teach them?”

  “Teach?”

  “The boys. Your boys.”

  “I taught them teamwork. Loyalty. Leadership.”

  “I see.”

  “That’s good, isn’t it? Right? That’s good.”

  “Depends on the work, the object, and the need, respectively.”

  “So was I wrong then? I mean, I don’t really get what’s going on here.”

  “Good! I see you’ve come with your desire to understand intact. That’s good. But you’re reading this all wrong. You’ll see. This is more burlesque than parable. By the time you get here, you’re out of time, so parables are useless. Step over here, please.”

  Guy is facing a security checkpoint: a gate. “Please step through the pearly gate, sir,” says one of the others, presumably an angel, in a white shirt and starched black trousers. Guy notes that the gate is indeed pearly, but not made of pearl. It has the pearly purple sheen of a knob of bone. He passes through and the alarm, a cross between birdsong and windchimes, sounds.

  One of Peter’s helpers comes forward with a security wand. He starts removing the offending articles. “What have we here?” the angel says, and with a flourish he seems to whip Guy’s lungs right out of his chest. They’re blue and red, and as he holds them up, they appear to be a pair of boxer shorts. He gives them one good shake, flaps them so they make a loud noise, thwapping like a snapped towel. He brings them to his nose and sniffs.

  “Cut that out,” says St. Peter, “that’s disgusting.”

  “These are fine, a little smoky,” the angel says as he throws them over his shoulder. They catch on the elbow of his wing, which Guy now notices
for the first time.

  “Military service?” says St. Peter.

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “Is that a bad thing?”

  “Could be. It depends.”

  “On what?”

  The angel and St. Peter exchange what look to Guy like worried glances. St. Peter makes a note. “Better pat him down,” he sighs, shaking his bald head. “You’re not supposed to ask that, Guy.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you’re supposed to know,”says the angel. “Uh-oh. What’s this?” He has taken the item from Guy swiftly and soundlessly the way a magician might take a coin or an egg from behind a child’s ear. He holds it up for inspection. It looks like a squid and Guy sees it is his heart.

  “Gimme that,” says the other angel. The heart’s squidlike appendages are wriggling.

  “No you don’t. It’s mine,” says the angel with the wand.

  “Oh come on, just a taste. At least save me one of the tentacles.”

  “Will you two cut it out?” says St. Peter. “Just give me the information. How many tentacles?”

  “Eight,” says the angel with the wand. “No, nine. Sorry. And there may be a little one growing here on the underside. Hard to tell.”

  “Not bad. Not bad,” says St. Peter, writing in the big book. “A nine and a half His pineal?”

  The angel makes a loose fist, places it between Guy’s brows, puts his lips to it, and sucks once, hard. He takes what looks like a cat’s eye marble from his lips and wipes it on his gown, holds it up and looks at it. “A little murky. Not much mileage on it. Five on a scale of ten maybe.”

  “Okay, so look,” St. Peter says, addressing Guy, “you’re an average guy, Guy. What if we sent you back, threw you back like a fish?”

  Guy thrilled at the thought!

  And that’s how Guy was born to Senor Eduardo Hughes and Senora Ester Roosen of Montevideo, Uruguay, nine months later. Eight pounds, seven ounces. They named him Eduardo after his father and Galeano after his mother’s family name, and worried that his head was shaped like a plantain, but the doctors told them everything would be all right, that his head would get round in a few days’ time and then they could worry about other things.

  FORTUNE

  Tommy, Tommy, Tommy. Here. I’m planting these begonias here. I hope they take. I can’t stay long. It looks like rain again. I stopped at your mothers grave, too, and left her some of them white mums she liked. I didn’t plant hers, though, just set the pot in front of her side of the stone, by where her dates are carved, and come right over here. I brought you something. Let me dig a little hole here. Put it right in here and cover it up. There. Its yours. Now listen to this story while I get some rocks around this so the goddamned rain don’t wash it out.

  This happened yesterday. I’m coming out of SNAK-MART with my lotto ticket same as always, a buck a day except for Sundays. Hell, the four blocks there and back’s the only exercise I get these days. And Berj, the Persian—he’s about it for company. I buy my ticket and he smiles. “Have good one,” he says. “You too,” I tell him. What the hell. He’s not a bad guy, just not much for conversation. SNAK-MART was Mickey Fields’ back when you knew it, not no more. When Mickey’s wife passed on, he left it to his son John. Him you would remember. Then later Mickey died and John sold out and moved away someplace. But to hell with it, Tommy, I’m not complaining, that’s just how it is.

  So listen. I’m standing in this little doorway there ‘cause as I’m coming out the rain comes down, no warning or nothing. The goddamn street is boiling and the gutters are running and I look up and there’s a straight line cutting right across the sky. It’s dark as hell on one side, bright blue on the other. And the line is moving. Eerie, it was. Put me in mind of that time once when you were little, when the light went funny and you got shook and I said there was nothing to be scared of’cause I’d read the papers and I knew it was an eclipse. And you wanted to know what an eclipse was and I tried my best to explain it but you were, hell, I think in kindergarten. I remember saying my head was the sun, and this fist was the earth, and this one was the moon, and I’m sure I got it all balled up, but it didn’t matter. You only needed to know there was an explanation. Or maybe that your Daddy had one for you, I don’t know.

  But I’m way off track. There was this kid—I say kid, he was maybe twenty, T-shirt and jeans, a backpack—he comes out the store behind me, but he can’t get the door open far because I’m standing there. So you know me—I’m even fatter now—I kind of squash myself against the wall till he gets out and pulls his backpack through. And then he sees the rain. So now there’s two of us standing there.

  And the kid is nervous. Rocking back and forth. I’m getting nervous too, you want to know the truth. We’re right on top of each other and it’s raining like all hell broke loose, and you know me, I’d never say nothing, but the kid don’t smell too good. There’s people in all the doorways and under all the awnings up and down across the street, but I can’t hardly see them through the rain. Every once in a while there’s a flash of lightning and the thunder is cracking and booming. Magnificent, it was.

  Then it stops. Just like that. It must have kept on raining to the east—no, south, I guess. That line was still across the sky but it was farther off now, to my right, on the other side of the firehouse. And I tell you the rain shut off like that, like somebody’d turned off a goddamned spigot.

  Right then, the kid asks do I have the time. Five thirty-five, I tell him.

  “Shit!” he yells, and you know me, I jump, I don’t like sudden noises, and he’s gone.

  There was a rainbow it turns out. Up in back of me where I couldn’t see, but everybody across the street is shading their eyes and pointing up at it.

  This car was coming around the curve there—you know where I mean, there by the bank—and the driver was kind of ducking down and looking up to see what everybody’s pointing at, and by the time he saw the kid it was too late. He hit the brakes but the street was slick and the kid went down and the car slid over him and stopped.

  I only ever heard things get that quiet once or twice before. The time the doctor give your mother and me your diagnosis, telling us the name for it and how rare it was and that the odds were you’d be gone before the year was out. And maybe again years later when I found your mother down the cellar by the washing machine. All you could hear was the goddamned windshield wipers screeching on the dry glass. I knew—everybody knew—the kid was dead.

  They must have seen it from the firehouse ‘cause the EMTs come right away to pull him out. I heard one say it took his face right off. I never saw that though, thank God. I was already close to throwing up, I was so shook.

  I could hardly talk to the cop. The TV crew was there and I tried to tell them about that line that moved across the sky, and how fast the rain stopped, and the rainbow, and how all them things come together, and how the kid asked for the time and ran out, and the car, and all the stuff I just told you, but then they didn’t put me on. I watched that night, on the eleven o’clock. They had some other guy who saw it on. He was saying things like, “The gray vehicle entered the intersection from the southwest,” and “the pedestrian was crossing rapidly,” bullshit like that, and it made me angry. Like you could make some sense of a thing like that by telling it cold, with the heart ripped out of it.

  When the news goes off, at midnight, they pick the winning number. How do I explain this? You never seen it. We never let you stay up that late. Theres this machine full of ping-pong balls with numbers on them popping around inside like crazy, like a popcorn popper. Then some young lady the money guys dress up in a slinky outfit opens a little gate and a ball pops up, and then another one, and then another till we got all seven numbers. Tommy, I tell you I sat there like it was a dream, one goddamned digit at a time, and I felt nothing. Anger, maybe. And disgust. Call me a fool but I don’t want it, not no more. So here. To hell with it. Besides, it’s yours. It’s the goddamned fa
mily fortune.

  INTERFERENCE

  During that summer of 1960, when he was eleven, Gregory Kessler liked to go upstairs and sing into the window fan in his bedroom. He liked the funny way it made his voice sound and he imagined the words on the other side of the window, shredded into tiny pieces and blowing out over the neighborhood on the evening breeze. He pictured them like snow swirling across the street to Willy Hunsicker’s house, second from the corner, where evenings Willy’s mother would sit in an aluminum and canvas beach chair on the sidewalk with her stockings rolled down to her ankles, smoking a cigarette and reading the newspaper in the light from the streetlamp on the corner; or up the block on the breeze to Kenny and Neil Messinger’s house with their father just waking to help put the younger kids to bed before he left for the Uptown Diner—“Breakfast 24 hrs”—and then the night shift at Eli Coal & Carbon. If the breeze were blowing just right, a few words might make it around the corner to where Margaret Fisher lived, where the roots of the horse chestnut tree heaved up the sidewalk so that walking by you were, for a moment, tall enough to see into her house. At school last year, in fifth grade, Gregory had been paired with Margaret for a procession on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, and when she took his hand, he let himself feel all the things the songs on the radio, the songs he sang into the fan, were about.

  And they called it puppy love.

  Oh, I guess they’ll never know

  How a young heart really feels

  And why I love her so.

  Margaret was quiet and kept entirely to herself. Gregory was com-fortable with her shyness. He himself preferred solitude to hanging around with the only two guys in the neighborhood his age: Willy Hunsicker, who outweighed him by thirty pounds and had once sat on him and made him eat a worm, and Chris Messinger, who made him nervous because he was always burning stuff—model cars, toy soldiers, and once, his little sisters doll—dousing things with lighter fluid and putting a match to them.