Panorama City

by Antoine Wilson

  DOUBLE AGENT

  There are worse things in the world than being taken advantage of, was what I came up with after I had made my way back to my room. I pulled the chair into my closet again and poked my head up into the ceiling and passed Paul Renfro the bag of burgers and fries. I apologized for the fact that they weren’t warm but he didn’t seem to mind. He poured whole ketchup packets in his mouth and then filled his mouth with fries and chewed until he was able to swallow. Aunt Liz knocked on my door and said she was going to drive me to work this morning, she was going to deliver me herself, we were leaving in a half hour, she didn’t want me getting into trouble on the streets of Panorama City. Paul asked if I could bring him some water as soon as possible. And some pushpins or thumbtacks. I knew Aunt Liz would take a while to get dressed and made up, she would not be caught out in public without painting her face, which I took for granted at the time but which gets stranger the more I think about it. I provided Paul with pushpins recovered from Aunt Liz’s corkboard, she kept a corkboard by the phone, with pictures and cards and old invitations on it. All of the pushpins were in use, but I was able to remove some without disturbing the alignment of the pictures by causing some pins to do double duty, holding up more than one picture or invitation by taking advantage of where they overlapped, which was a perfectly reasonable way to arrange a corkboard. I provided Paul with water from the laundry room, where Aunt Liz kept a water dispenser. I lifted a still-sealed jug into the ceiling for Paul to drink from. It was quite heavy, he could hardly move it, he said it must have been five gallons at least. I wanted to make sure he had enough water for the whole time I would be gone, it could get hot up there, I wanted to keep him hydrated so that his thinking could be clear and productive instead of delusional and incorrect.

  After I had gotten him everything he needed, I announced that I couldn’t possibly go to work. I had carefully considered Aunt Liz’s plan for me, I had run a clinical trial testing her plan, or most of one, and I had found it lacking, I had found all aspects of it wanting, I needed as soon as possible to return to my original plans and goals, which were to come to Panorama City, and become a man of the world, and return to Madera, and find Carmen again. Paul reminded me that this was a time for planning and considering, not implementing. Paul said that without these lodgings, without this hermitage, his word, he would have no chance to advance his thinking. He couldn’t risk expending his energies on legal struggles. If I truly wanted to help him, he told me, I would have to do so while arousing as little suspicion as possible, which meant, he was sorry to tell me, acting as though Aunt Liz’s plan for me was working just fine, as if the Lighthouse Fellowship was fulfilling my spiritual needs, as if Dr. Rosenkleig was making some kind of progress, however he liked to measure it, as if I’d rather do nothing more than make french fries for people who barely seemed aware they were eating. Aunt Liz knocked again. Paul said, Make it through today and tonight we’ll fix everything, tonight we’ll work on your plan to become a man of the world. I did not have time to shower, I prefer to shower every day, but I did not have time, I pulled on my fast-food place uniform and went out. Aunt Liz drove me to work, where I found a balding photographer with a walrus mustache sitting on bags of equipment, waiting to shoot my Employee of the Month photo.

  Which is why, when you pick through my old things, which you will, which I won’t blame you for doing, feel free to explore the bits and pieces I’ve left behind, most of them once belonged to your grandfather, I’ve never been a collector, other than bicycles, but which is why when you find my Employee of the Month photograph, they gave me an extra copy, unframed, you’ll look at me, at your father, and you’ll think there is something missing. It is me, I am missing, I mean my body is there, my face, my uniform, all of that, but I am not there inside. I mentioned before that your grandfather used to say that he was only a passenger in his body. I never fully understood what he was talking about until I saw that picture of myself as Employee of the Month, shot the day after Paul Renfro moved into Aunt Liz’s ceiling. I’m sure others could have done a better job, I’m sure others could have put on a more convincing smile, I’m sure there are those who go about their daily business in service of something else completely unrelated, who turn off their thinking for the promise of some other later thinking, but I have no idea how they do it. There is such a thing as pretending to live, Juan-George, I’m not good at it.

  I spent that day terrified they would see through me and know I was only pantomiming, and suspect me of hiding something, and search the house, and discover Paul Renfro in the ceiling. But Roger Macarona did not notice. Melissa did not notice. Wexler did not notice. Harold, who couldn’t be expected to notice anything other than his fingertip, did not notice. The Employee of the Month photographer did not notice. The customers certainly did not notice. Aunt Liz, who not only dropped me off at work but also picked me up afterward to take me to Dr. Rosenkleig’s, did not notice. She only asked me whether the fastfood place bag I was holding was the same one from that morning, I told her of course it wasn’t, she said it stank, I moved my seat all the way back. But surely, of all people, Dr. Rosenkleig would notice. This was his stock in trade, as they say. I am not a liar, I tell the truth, but when Dr. Rosenkleig asked me that day how my clinical trial was going, I knew what he wanted to hear, and I delivered the words like fries on a tray. I told him that the clinical trial was going surprisingly well, I told him that Aunt Liz had chosen correctly for me. I told him how proud I was to have been named Employee of the Month, I used some of Roger Macarona’s previous words to express my disbelief, I told him how much it meant to me to have a job and duties I could call my own. I told him how someday I hoped to be a manager myself. I told him how much it meant to me to be a part of the larger fast-food place family. I had believed that once, I’m not sure for how long, or when I stopped believing it, but I didn’t believe it anymore and I told Dr. Rosenkleig that I did. I told him that the Lighthouse Fellowship had put me in touch with a spiritual side of myself I hadn’t known was there, and that I felt bonded with so many members of that vibrant spiritual community I didn’t feel the need to make new friends anymore. I told him, in short, the opposite of everything I felt, I expressed myself using the exact opposite words, including, because I knew it would get back to Aunt Liz, and because I knew Aunt Liz would be pleased to hear it, including telling Dr. Rosenkleig what a relief it was to be somewhere where nobody treated me like the village idiot.

  That afternoon, after Aunt Liz drove me home, I went up into the ceiling for the first time. The access panel was barely large enough for me to fit through, but I managed somehow to rein in my elbows and pull myself up. Once there, I couldn’t believe my eyes. Paul had transformed the space completely. It was as if his briefcase, which had always contained more inside than seemed possible from the outside, had exploded. Papers everywhere, tacked to the beams, wedged between the studs, tucked into the insulation, piled in the corners. The dozen or so pushpins I had requisitioned from Aunt Liz’s corkboard were engaged in astonishing feats of redundancy, each one pressed through the corners of countless pages, diagrams, charts, and notes. A settled smell of fast-food place food thickened the air. The water bottle sat in the corner, open, a sheet of paper over the top. Paul had found a string of Christmas lights somewhere and connected them to the spare electrical outlet for the air-conditioning blower. I asked him whether he wouldn’t rather have a regular lamp, I could probably find him one, and he said that he preferred the Christmas lights. At first they had bothered him as too festive for sober thought, his words, but then he realized that all the colors added up to white, and that the separation of colors was conducive to splitting the brilliant white glow of revelation into individually colored bands of thought. The space had turned out to be a boon to advanced thinking, as he had always suspected it would be, the attic being the cranium of the house. The only problem was gaining access to the toilet, he needed a way to get down to the bathroom and back again without leaving
any traces, which was to say without leaving the desk chair sitting in the middle of the closet. He had been urinating in the overflow pan below the air-conditioning coil, he’d had to urinate slowly to prevent the pan from filling up, but otherwise it had been draining completely. As long as I could provide a daily trip down to earth for his more solid business it would suffice. I helped him down for that essential purpose, and once his feet hit the ground he seemed deeply uncomfortable, like a raccoon out in the middle of the day. He didn’t breathe normally until he was finished and safe again up in the confines of his thinking space.

  He showed me that he could make his way, via my ceiling, to the ceiling over the living room, from which he could see through a vent the front entrance. If someone came looking for him, he said, he’d be the first to know. This was crucial, he explained, because since we’d worked together last, meaning on the antioxidant cream, no more of that, he added, he was on the straight and narrow, since we’d worked together last, he had suffered a series of persecutions of unimaginable variety, his words. Not once during the course of them had he encountered a fellow thinker, he added, which resulted in the double indignity of not only suffering but also having nobody understand the context of his suffering. I had no idea, I would have tried to find him had I known, had I not been pursuing my clinical trial of Aunt Liz’s plan for me. That was when he explained to me about clinical trials typically being tilted in favor of whoever sponsors them, and about my failure to define my terms. He blamed me for none of it, he could never blame a fellow thinker for any attempt to advance knowledge. Even missteps count when you’re moving toward this kind of goal, his words.

  I had forgotten, I think, or not realized, or I had gotten entangled in the wrong part of my head, I had forgotten that despite the avalanche of difficulties I’d faced, and the eruptions of unintended consequences arising from my every action, I’d forgotten that I had been in fact advancing knowledge, in my own way, a bit at a time. I reminded Paul that I was still seeking the path toward becoming a man of the world, not having found it as Employee of the Month, or at the Lighthouse Fellowship, or in Dr. Rosenkleig’s chamber of framed diplomas, or anywhere else for that matter. Paul blew out his cheeks and exhaled. The time had come for him, he said, to talk to me about provincial types.

  He asked me to picture a man of the world in my head. He asked me if I saw in my mind’s eye a watch on a chain, or a three-piece suit, or alligator shoes. Sure, I said, sure I did. He informed me that I was actually picturing a provincial type, not a man of the world. You can always tell a provincial type by the way he makes a show of reading the newspaper, a provincial type will always hold the newspaper high, and it will never be the local paper, and he will read it as if nothing else matters, but when the provincial type is finished, Paul’s words, he leaves his newspaper all over the place, he never folds it properly, he treats it as something to be disposed of sloppily, to be cast aside, with none of the importance it had held for him only moments before. In this way, he demonstrates that he is above the so-called fray. He has used the newspaper to confirm himself, to confirm what is not true, that he is a man of the world, and now he must discard it, he must cast it aside, or be drawn down to its level. But in fact he operates at exactly its level, Paul’s words. A newspaper puts the whole world onto a few pages, and provincial types put the whole world into their wine cellars, or well-stamped passports, or art collections. They collect, and they congregate, in packs and clubs, fraternities and cooperatives, civic groups and associations, behind labels and pins, on plaques and lists, in registers and yearbooks. They announce at every turn, in every manner imaginable, their worldliness, but in actuality their response to the human condition is to winnow and huddle, Paul’s words, they turn their backs on the world and call it living. This is why provincial types love to say that great minds think alike, it is one of their favorite phrases. But in actuality, and in biological fact, Paul’s words, small minds think alike.

  He squinted at me like he was trying to look through a dirty window, and then he said that the true path was not wide or straight, that he could take me only as far as the trailhead, that above all things a man of the world stood alone, that to deny our fundamental solitude was to persist under a most dangerous illusion. He put his hand on my shoulder and said that sincere friendship, the kind of friendship we shared, was a great balm, but it was only a balm, it did not change the so-called ground rules. There was knocking at my door below. Aunt Liz asked what I was doing, she thought she’d heard voices. I stuck my head down through the ceiling panel and told her I’d been listening to my Bible, she’d been hearing my Bible on tape. Dinner was ready, she said, could I come to dinner?

  I don’t have time here, Juan-George, to tell you about every meal I ate, or every face Aunt Liz made, or every moment of my life, I wish I did, I wish I could take you back in time with me, so that you could stand on my shoulders, so that you could know your father firsthand, but I cannot, there isn’t time, there isn’t enough tape in the world. But though the terminus approaches, though the dawn I won’t see is coming, I want to take a moment to tell you about that night’s dinner with Aunt Liz. It wasn’t what was said, I was not a great conversationalist that night, I was mainly trying to keep from arousing any suspicion. Aunt Liz talked, she’d spoken with Dr. Rosenkleig, she expressed pleasure and surprise at my turning over a new leaf, her words. I didn’t know what to say, I couldn’t prop up the illusion, but I didn’t dare topple it either. I watched Aunt Liz’s hand gripping the spaghetti spoon and putting noodles on my plate, I saw the spots, I saw the muscles and tendons, I saw the strength and the weakness all at once. She went back into the bowl with the spaghetti spoon, this time specifically to grab me an extra meatball. She looked at me, her no-nonsense eyes peering over her reading/ eating glasses, and asked whether there were enough meatballs on my plate or would I like another. And I had the feeling, the overwhelming feeling that Aunt Liz knew well the solitude that Paul had talked about. She was always reaching across the divide.

  After dinner I returned to the ceiling, I was ready to begin, I was ready to hear what Paul had been working on, and I was ready to assist him however I could, whatever I could do to counteract the pantomime of my life. I was ready to be a double agent, I was ready to fake my way through daily life in order to sustain the illusion that I was on board with Aunt Liz’s plan for me. I found Paul lying on a mattress of insulation he’d stripped from between joists, silver with pink fiber guts spilling out the sides. He wore new clothes, and I wondered where he’d gotten them, until I noticed the odd stitching and realized he’d turned his suit inside out. I cleared my throat, but he remained on his back, arms out to the sides, not moving, not speaking, staring at the papers he’d tacked above his head. After what I would now call a protracted silence, he explained that he was reading his old notes, refilling his mind with the basic questions he was trying to solve, he hadn’t even reached the point at which progress could be made, he was still catching up with himself, with his former self, he was making himself into a duplicate of who he’d been, this was a fragile phase. He had faced so many obstacles, obstacles upon obstacles, in his journey, that along the way he’d become someone who faces obstacles, rather than someone who advances thinking, and the only way back was to become his former self, a duplicate of his former self. What he was doing was reabsorbing all of his old ideas, was catching up, so to speak, was starting again from where he’d last been interrupted, which was something mankind itself couldn’t do, would never do, there was too much history. So-called scholars tried to absorb the research in their fields, but it was mostly paperwork, the contrails of careerism, Paul’s words, and as a result those scholars stood on the shoulders of ants. I asked Paul what some of the basic questions were, maybe I could help him think them through from my inflatable mattress, maybe we could engage in some parallel processing, I didn’t use that term, I hadn’t yet learned that term from Paul, I used some other words I can’t remember. Paul told me he
appreciated the offer but he himself didn’t really know what the basic questions were, he hadn’t gotten that far.