Permafrost

by Peter Robertson

  In the sober, sexually diminished light of day he’d come across as a drooling cretin, but that night he sounded like the last sensualist romantic on earth.

  “She’s a rare beauty,” I said. I meant it too.

  “You fancy her.” He wisely divined.

  “You’d have to be blind not to.”

  He nodded. “True.” He said it wistfully.

  “She’s been with Jules for a while now.”

  He nodded again. “She has. Christ, I hurt all over.”

  “Love hurts.” I said.

  “Not like this. I spewed blood on the grass. Have you ever been in love?”

  “Is it any of your business?”

  “No.” He hesitated. “But I can see that you haven’t. It really does fuck you up.” Was he talking about love or a beating?

  “I can imagine,” I said. “How’s the nose now?”

  “Sore. Since you asked.”

  “I have to go and piss very soon. I think.”

  “You really shouldn’t drink so much.”

  “That’s very good advice. Thank you so much.”

  “I’ll see you later then,” he said.

  “You’ll be okay?” I asked.

  “My youth is forever gone,” he intoned solemnly. “And I may have overrated her. Joyce. It’s just possible. She might not be worth all this.”

  “You’re a sick man. You should find someone else.”

  “An outstanding idea. Who did you get that cigarette from? Another would be just the ticket.”

  “Actually I got it from Jules,” I said truthfully. “He’s feeling very generous.”

  “I suppose you think that’s funny.”

  In the bathroom there was a dry toothbrush in the medicine cabinet and an unopened tube of Macleans toothpaste. I brushed my teeth slowly and looked at my face in the mirror. The bathroom was decorated a deep blue, a nice enough color, but somewhat unflattering to anyone with a pale complexion brought on by a cold winter and too much beer. I washed my face in ice-cold water and dried it on a blue towel that perfectly matched the walls.

  Did I look like someone who’d never been in love? I probably did. I wonder if I still do.

  Keith was gone from the dining room when I returned and I was as much relieved as disappointed.

  I gently rolled the drunk off my coat and left the party. I was late for the last bus home by fifteen minutes, but Umberto’s Chip Shop was still open on the corner, so I went in. Vinegary steam poured out the door as I entered. As I was his last customer of the night, Umberto insisted on filling my bag to overflowing with chips he said he would only have to throw away if I didn’t take them. I tried to protest.

  “No. You take them.” He said. “You not take them I have to eat them and I not need them.” He patted a large but solid-looking midsection. “You nothing but skin and bones. Go. I shut up shop for the night now.” And he waved me away.

  * * *

  I ate my way through about five pounds of chips as I walked home, in my head planning a series of complex and chivalrous strategies for winning girls away from posturing bullies.

  I walked for almost an hour and I savored every cold second of it, taking the shortcut across a frozen mud path that ran between the public golf course and the school fence, then across the abandoned, graffiti-covered railway bridge against which I stopped to piss luxuriously, and onto a piece of wasteland that my mother’s small house backed onto. I jumped the fence into our back garden, past the tiny greenhouse where my late father had puttered all the daylight hours he wasn’t working, and in through the back door that my mother had foolishly, kindly, left unlocked.

  * * *

  Ten days later the true story of Jules and Joyce was revealed to me in the back of a dull physics class. Joyce had apparently found out that Jules was going to pack her in and she didn’t want to lose her man. So she decided to make him jealous, and poor smitten Keith got the job. He was the youngest boy at the party and, she rightly judged, the most likely to piss Jules off a lot. So Keith got the vacuum kiss and the snake-length tongue and it all worked out just fine when she told the drunken Jules that Keith had forced her into it. Jules lost his nut and laid into Keith. Joyce got Jules back and a quick shag on the coats in the necking room later that night. Jules got his shag and the chance to beat up a boy two years younger than himself as a nifty bonus. Keith got a peek at his own personal heaven for a minute, his conk battered, and then maybe he even lost his dreams too. That night.

  But no. That wasn’t quite right.

  Because he was still fighting for love when I left him.

  We smiled after that, Keith and I did, as we passed each other in the school corridors. And I watched his nose slowly get better. We were never to become best friends.

  But we did smile.

  And we would cross paths twice more.

  THREE

  The noise of the air conditioner in my office was distracting so I turned it off, sitting without moving in the warming silence, thinking about Keith, and constructing some kind of justification for what I planned to do.

  The window shades were slit almost shut and the overhead light was turned off in the converted factory building where pencils were once manufactured.

  The building now stands surrounded by converted lofts and art galleries and coffee houses and health clubs to work out in, in a rapidly gentrifying section of the city.

  I called my place ArtWorks when I opened it. We custom frame pictures. The people who work for me are extremely competent, and I am at best extraneous to the day-to-day operation. Yet I come in early to work every day, and stay until we close, for reasons that have not been clear to me for a while, and try to look thoughtful, like the perfect boss, when I am asked a question by someone who already knows the answer.

  * * *

  There was a gentle knock and Cynthia came into my office. She brought coffee without my asking and I sipped at it after she left. I don’t require any of my employees to fetch my coffee. If I want coffee I always ask if anyone else does, and if they do then I make them coffee, because, above all else, at ArtWorks we earnestly strive to maintain the illusion of equality.

  * * *

  In my first hour of silence I had arrived at a strategy. In my second hour, fortified by caffeine, I telephoned the British Consulate and the tourism board. Both calls were answered by harassed clerks with excellent manners and little authority, but I was promised prompt callbacks by more knowledgeable superiors.

  A man from the tourism board clearly wishing to be nameless did call back very quickly, adamantly claiming to know nothing, and caring to divulge nothing, beyond the facts already presented in the newspaper article.

  The police in several states had been notified, he did grudgingly allow. It was a police matter, he said curtly. I sensed he was constructing official barriers of denial beyond which I clearly wasn’t welcome.

  Was I even a relative? Did I have information? He wanted to know. His voice tended to naturally italicize.

  I told him I wasn’t. And I didn’t.

  * * *

  So I hung up, not terribly surprised at his reaction, which made Keith seem like a high priority police matter, even though I strongly suspected that he wasn’t.

  I looked at Sidekick on my computer screen and the time blinked at me in an ugly analog approximation. It would be six hours later in Britain. The middle of the afternoon.

  I could call there. Who would I call there? And what would I say?

  There was a gentle knock at my door, and before I could answer the door had opened and Nye had quietly entered.

  ArtWorks does not make a profit, because that’s how I choose to run it, and because I suspect I wouldn’t like the place much if it did. But it also runs like clockwork and that’s because Nigel Prior runs it that way.

  An elderly, sp
insterish twenty-seven, five years past his college graduation, where he majored in interpretive dance, of all things, Nye’s rail-thin and tall and as always impeccable in an olive-green linen/cotton shirt and khaki cotton trousers, which I happen to know were purchased from Banana Republic.

  Nye Prior is possibly the blackest person on the face of the planet, his face an imperious and inscrutable shadow that graced my door four years ago. Now he effectively runs things, powers us into the computer age with a vengeance, and leaves me free to squander the abundance of free time he has thrust my way.

  Keith Pringle and I come from a land without people of color; pale inhabitants who tan easily cover the mossy hills and valleys, so quite often I err, making silly graceless remarks that Nye seems willing to forgive because I clearly don’t know any better. But I never know how deep the hurt penetrates.

  Nye is a gay man, albeit in an introverted, near-celibate manner that never seeks to advertise itself. Like many gay men he carries a list of the loved and the dead. He is very careful nowadays, and I suspect his sexuality has become a burden to him.

  Below the imperious Nye are six girls and Titus, or Tye, as he has naturally become known. Tye is also black, but a paler shade of black, and he is very handsome, in a big, loutish, health-club manner, twenty-four, and also gay, but of a decidedly more hedonistic bent. In the face of Tye’s slapdash sexuality, Nye quietly yet earnestly lectures. Yet Tye cruises on. Tye has been here two years. He’s feckless and messy but he’s beloved by my customers and mothered rather furiously by my girls, who fear Nye a little and, I think, consider me at best a wealthy dilettante and all-round loafer of little real consequence.

  Tye has a gift for putting people at their ease and little talent in the art of picture-framing. He captures people, whereas Nye repels whenever possible. I fall somewhere between the two, finding myself constantly perceived as aloof, when I’m actually only uncomfortable.

  The ArtWorks girls tend to be interchangeable. If one leaves, she invariably has a friend, or a roommate, or a sister, or a brother’s girlfriend who happily steps in, and, guided by the proper, gently frowning, always diligent Nye, there is scarcely a ripple in our productivity. Two girls have, to my knowledge, fallen hard for Tye, and this he naturally finds hilarious.

  If any have been smitten by the dictatorial charms of Nye he has kept it to himself.

  These are my crew, along with the two elderly men who run the stockroom in the basement of the building, and the three elderly ladies who provide a stellar cleaning service in the wee night hours after we close.

  This then is my ArtWorks, a small, tidy, much admired business that operates efficiently, without ever threatening to generate a profit.

  A new and powerful computer sits on my desk and, in all honesty, merely takes up a lot of beige space. Nye keeps us firmly on the cutting edge, and, in his defense, it must be stated that he zealously ferrets out bargains. Nonetheless he is a fanatic, and I strongly suspect we have more ram and dram and megabytes and swap files than we really need. If Nye no longer has a sex life then he at least has an active and safe passion.

  * * *

  Two weeks ago Nye put in an upgrade to our operating system. We techno-philistines can’t actually tell the difference, but Nye was spotted humming to himself, which is always a sure sign of his overall well-being.

  He told me about it, indicating that while he was more than satisfied with his purchase, he thought that one aspect of the system wasn’t quite up to snuff. Could he find a solution? I innocently inquired. Yes, I was informed, there was a small northern Californian software company that manufactured just such a product, which would serve as a useful add-on.

  Well, that sounds fine, I said.

  Nye went to his computer to purchase ten copies of the supplementary product, while I faxed my broker and suggested buying shares in the smaller company. Our two deals were quickly done.

  In the next few days I went online and monitored my new stock on the share index. As other companies upgraded their systems they too had found that they needed the add-on product and confidence in the small company rose. The share prices responded in kind. The company that manufactured the operating system, a juggernaut of a multinational organization, quickly saw their error, and bought a controlling interest in the small company, adding the program to future upgrades of their operating system. Confidence in the larger company rose, and the shares I had also bought in them, also rose steeply.

  There are, I suspect, two truisms in investment. Firstly, consumer and industry confidence motivate the price of shares. And secondly, making more money when you already possess a lot of money is a relatively painless and simple endeavor, especially if you place little value on the money in the first place.

  My two stock purchases had produced high short-term dividends. I brought up a calculator on the screen and came up with a profit of close to $150,000. I considered selling, but decided that the long-term prognosis for the parent company looked rosy. I bought more stock with my profits, and had my broker cut Nye a check for fifteen thousand dollars. A finder’s fee if you will.

  The subject of making money isn’t a particularly fascinating one. It is an achievement neither brave nor noble, and has a level of satisfaction comparable with the solving of a tricky New York Times crossword puzzle in ink, by an experienced old hand.

  Of course I speak from the position of a man unconcerned with shoehorning his meager salary into an adequate living for himself and a family.

  Nye was holding the aforementioned check in his hand as he entered my office.

  He spoke resignedly. “This really isn’t necessary.” He sat down, folding one leg carefully over the other.

  “Perhaps not.” I said. “But it’s fair. It was your information after all, and without talking to you there would be nothing.” I shrugged. “But if you like we can tear it up.”

  “No,” there was the lightest imprint of a smile. “And thank you.” He folded the check carefully in half, and slipped it into his shirt packet, checking to make sure the paper wasn’t sticking out.

  I pay Nye much more than he needs, as he has told me without qualms. If his exact life’s motivation remains ethereal, it’s clear that money certainly isn’t a consideration, beyond food, and clothes, and software.

  But I keep on doing it anyway. So he had put his unused money away in various sensible places, a few even suggested by me. And still he has too much left over to play with.

  He sighed. “I suppose there are some things.”

  “Perhaps some computer things?” I inquired gently.

  Nye nodded slowly.

  He looked at his watch, a chunky digital affair manufactured by Timex and Microsoft that could read and store information from a computer screen. Nye had bought it the first day they were made available, ignoring the sad fact that it looked as if it should still have the residue of breakfast cereal stuck to it. But, for once in Nye’s ordered life, style wasn’t the central point here. Technology was.

  “I should go back downstairs.” He paused. “Tye’s not in yet.”

  It was hardly an earth-shattering piece of news. “Has he called in?”

  Nye didn’t answer, but his mouth turned a shade lemony.

  “Another of his sick relatives?” I inquired

  He nodded. “At last count he’s got four infirm sisters.”

  I smiled. “I think he’s actually an only child.”

  “Thanks again for this.” He touched his pocket.

  “You’re very welcome.”

  He turned when he got to the door.

  “How’s the machine working out?” He gestured toward the computer on my desk.

  “Oh, very nice.” I said. I was being a little less than completely honest. I couldn’t tell the difference from the old one. “And we’re still playing tonight?” I asked him.

  “Of course,”
he said, and turned to leave.

  * * *

  As he closed the door my telephone rang, and a Ms. Chalmers from the British Consulate was breathless on the line and ever so sorry she’d not been there earlier to answer my query.

  As I began to speak I deliberately let my native accent return; words were lifted up at the end of sentences so that everything spoken was transformed into a gentle question.

  I told Ms. Chalmers I had read the paper, and that I had known Mr. Pringle, and I wondered perhaps if there was any other information? We were old friends you see? Had lost touch over the years? You know how it is?

  She listened neutrally before she finally spoke, then she volleyed my requests back with excruciating politeness. For the British, being polite can be both salve and irritant and if I harbored strong suspicions, I still wasn’t yet certain which was being applied.

  She commented how kind it was of me to call and inquire. It really was awfully sad wasn’t it? About poor Mr. Pringle.

  I quickly realized that she had little to add to the text of the newspaper article, but she was determined to be positively effusive with what she had.

  I lapsed into silence and waited. She was clearly a chatty person. And chatty people balk at the sound of silence, feeling the uncontrollable urge to keep on chatting.

  It quickly transpired that Mr. Keith Pringle, a British citizen of no fixed abode, had been granted a tourist visa for three months. That was a short-term visa, which forbade him seeking employment. She made it sound slightly dubious, so I asked why it was so short. Well, she said primly, Mr. Pringle wasn’t currently employed, wasn’t a wealthy man of independent means, and wasn’t married, or didn’t appear to have dependents. He was, in a word, footloose, and might therefore be considered a prime candidate for slipping between the cracks, and entering the shadowy realms of becoming an illegal alien.

  Yet he had been given a visa.