Heathern

by Jack Womack

  Susie laughed, flushing so with color that I thought her happiness might kill her. "Found a smart one for a change," she said.

  "Thinks he is," said Thatcher. Having seen his seduction foiled, he appeared now to be toying with fantasies of rape.

  "He obviously doesn't want to be bothered," I said. "Leave him alone. Hire an actor for your plots. Weren't you telling me how well that's worked before?"

  "Thatcher obviously feels he needs this kernel of winsome sincerity," Bernard said, "to grow his new crop of threats."

  "You can't get an actor for this kind of gig," said Thatcher. "Be like a white boy singing the blues. We'll play it by ear. I got a hunch he'll come around when he gets the right prompting." As he turned to me he paused, as if to make me more aware of how soon I would learn of my expanded role in this drama.

  Susie spoke to her husband as she got up to leave. "I'm going to the infirmary to check on Jake. Did you have to make Gus do that?"

  "It's what we pay 'em for."

  That afternoon I stopped by Bernard's office, suspecting I'd never see Macaffrey again, finding it impossible to remove him from my mind. Bernard sat surrounded by remnants of his personality: a photo of his wife, a Clio award he used as a paperweight, a pencil sketch of their late son, who was in a coma for a year before he died. Bernard, maker of millions-old millions-was bankrupt when he signed on at Dryco; I still had my jewelry. In the center of his desk was a brass-colored pen and pencil set in the shape of Dealey Plaza.

  "You're here to see our newest commercial," he said as I entered.

  "Am I?"

  "Sweetness, overseeing new projects requires that you feign interest even in the inanimate ones. Here we go."

  His set was a flat screen on the far wall; pressing the remote he rolled the spot, which not so much played as ricocheted. Sequential images flashed on during the first twenty seconds, coming too quick to grasp individually but showing myriad aspects of the worst of our world; the music backgrounding was the orchestral run swelling along the scale as it led to the bridge in "A Day in the Life." Before the mind overloaded the sound and picture changed, the music segued into a full chorus singing the "Song of joy" from Beethoven's Ninth; the blurs vanished into clean clouds seen at angel's altitude, the light aglow in bright blue air, sunrays lending that Nuremberg touch. As the company's motto superimposed itself onto the clouds it seemed to rise from the depths of heaven.

  D R Y C O

  Worry not. Wonder not.

  "Does it mean anything?" I asked, feeling as if a grenade had gone off in my head.

  "Does the signifier need the sign? It's meaning-packed at the core level. We've entered it for several awards-"

  "It's unreal even for television, Bernard."

  He pulled clippings from a folder on his desk. "Unreal," he said. "Listen to what we have here. Elvis appears on Mexican woman's taco, hundreds come to be healed. Pregnant by alien, woman sues NASA. Teacher at Dartmouth divides polisci class into Gestapo and Jews to illustrate the limits of power-three dead. All of this is just from last week's Times. What's the second leading cause of death among white American teenagers?"

  "Boredom?"

  "Peripherally," he said. "Autoerotic asphyxiation." Men tapped into inexhaustible strength so long as they possessed a battery of irrelevant facts; Bernard owned more than I could count. Men had a way of using their facts to propel them toward imagination, and not to truth. "You couldn't make it up."

  "I need to talk to you," I said.

  "Work-related?" he asked, shutting off the set.

  "Coincidentally."

  "Pity," he sighed. "This involves Thatcher's new avatar? At least it keeps him distracted--

  "I've never seen anyone get under your skin so."

  "Half-baked Jesus freak," said Bernard. "Too stupid to lie."

  "You hate him because you couldn't outtalk him," I said. "It's so obvious." Bernard's mood was changeable as tropical weather, and when he glared I feared I'd roused a typhoon. He didn't blow; the moment passed. "Bernard, what if you'd gotten so sick of working here you couldn't look at yourself in the morning?"

  "Where are the mirrors?" he asked, with mimic gestures delineating the room.

  "I've got to get away from this," I said. "I spend all my time doing nothing. I see no one but him. It's driving me crazy."

  "A benefit of the position," he said. Bernard never responded as I might have preferred, but unlike all others he always listened. "You arrived at any preliminary decisions yet? Been examining options? What have you done besides complain?"

  "Avi thinks I should live with my reality."

  "Gets tricky after awhile, doesn't it? Jobs, people, fish, all rot after three days. Say you quit. What happens?"

  "No income. I lose my apartment. I'm out on the street."

  He nodded. "If you get yourself fired?"

  "The same."

  "If you find another job and then quit?" Bernard asked. "Shouldn't leave one job until you have another one lined up, you know."

  "I'd still be working for him."

  "What if you request a horizontal promotion?" he asked. "Not in the sense with which you're most recently familiar-"

  "Transferred where?" I asked. "Data? I'd be blind in a month."

  "You could always go on Workfare," said Bernard. "Enter a shelter. One way or the other, you wouldn't be there long."

  "People get by with less than I have-"

  "People eat their dead in Brooklyn," he said. "Thatcher's not the worst man I've known. It's bound to happen eventually, so you should enjoy yourself while you can-"

  "Some mornings I wake up and just want to run away," I said. "Anywhere. Get in a car and drive and keep on driving."

  "Through our great and good land?" His face brightened as if he'd already received his awards. "You've flown over it, sweetness. I've been there. You think New York's bad? The people alone'd give you the willies. They smile the whole time they're bringing the axe down."

  "Something's happening to me, Bernard," I said. "I don't know what. It's as if somebody else is running away with me-"

  "You're getting older," he said; Bernard always listened, not always intelligently. "Avi's a sensible sort on occasion. Pay attention to what he tells you. Ignore the worst and do your job well. Forget the day as it passes. Enjoy your life as it is."

  "That makes me no better than they are," I said. "Worse, because I don't feel as they do."

  "Maybe you do and don't want to face it," he said. "These things sneak up on you, you know. Get that look off your face, sweetness, you wanted inspiration? I'm no messiah. I can't tell a crystal from a crack vial." He read his appointment book, his glasses low on his nose. "Pity me, my angel, I have to roll in the gutter with the mayor tonight. He's demanding specific dates as to when the Army might be expected to pacify Queens and I have to leave the date as being sometime during the twenty-first century. He's been causing so much annoyance of late."

  "You see no other options for me?"

  "See any mirrors?"

  "Travelready?" Jake asked, appearing at my office door as I prepared to leave. It was after eight.

  "All set," I said. Whenever I left late, alone, Jake assured my safety. Somehow I intimidated him; though never loquacious, he seemed especially numbtongued around me. Jake's was a prodigal's soul; his divine talents so influenced his every action and word as to overwhelm any would-be friend. I noticed a volume of Shakespeare, rather than the expected truncheon, stuffed into his jacket pocket.

  "Gus teaches you literature?" I asked as we rode down.

  "AO," he said. "Litcrit twicecovered this month."

  "So many wonderful characters," I said. Jake's presence aroused in me a deeply buried instinct that was still conceivably maternal. "You have any favorites?"

  "Ariel."

  A car waited at the curb to carry me home. Before we reached it I heard my name called; there was no forgetting Macaffrey's voice. He walked toward us, across our building's plaza; Jake, recognizing
him, allowed him to get to us.

  "You haven't been out here all day?" I asked.

  "I came back." In the streetlight his face held a hundred years' lines. "Would you walk with me?"

  Run was what I wanted to do. "Yes," I said, hearing a stranger speak for me. "Jake, I'll be going a different way tonight. I'll see you Monday."

  Jake remained where he stood, cautious as a cat. For the first time I noticed the bone-white cast gloving his finger and, suggesting no medical purpose, the scalpel attached to the tip.

  "Tell the driver to go on, Jake," I said. "I'll be all right."

  "You're chancing," he said, his sea-changing voice sometimes soprano, sometimes tenor, this moment unexpectedly clear and deep. Jake had only turned fourteen. "You know who lights the lights."

  "Worry not," I said, cheerfully corporate. "Have a good weekend."

  When we walked away there came an instant of silence, and then he cried out in higher pitch, perhaps only making sure that I still heard him. "Joanna-"

  "Jake?" That must have pleased him; without responding, he went inside to go home.

  With Macaffrey I wandered down Broad Street's gully. Small buildings plugged the rifts in the range, seeming no more than pebbles eroded from the sides of their mother boulders. Billboards of two years' vintage or older stood atop their low roofs. One sold the winner of the most recent Presidential election, and his face faded a little more each time I passed. Vice President once, he was shot before the last day of March, not more than a month and a half beyond his inauguration. His Vice President died five weeks after being sworn in, when Air Force One collided with a sightseeing helicopter over old Shea Stadium. His successor, dumb old Charlie, tried to escape on the day of the crash; after the jets forced his plane to the ground the crowd awaiting, seeing at last a reason to vote, affirmed that he be soundly beaten in their election. His successor and Thatcher worked something out that suited the Drydens for three months; Gus settled matters in Seattle. The present President, the fifth to take office that year, appreciated whose butter smeared his bread.

  "You'd never guess what your company does from the name," said Macaffrey. "What do you do for them?"

  "Less and less," I said. "Nominally I oversee new projects."

  "Like me?" he asked. "You must stay busy. They get that little fellow fixed up all right? I don't think he looked too kindly on your going off with me."

  "Jake takes his job seriously," I said. "Gus took him in off the street as an apprentice a year ago. He's grateful. Why were you out there waiting?"

  "Nowhere else to go," he said.

  "I'd think your schedule'd be booked--

  "On the way back this afternoon I stopped to get something to eat. When I got back to the school it'd been closed by order of the Army as a disorderly house. It's a subtle approach, I'll admit."

  We stood there for a moment as I estimated what I'd done. So many wings, so many flies, and my hands so hard at my work that I wondered if I still knew, at all times, what they did. "I'm so sorry," I said. "Thatcher thinks he can bully anyone into doing what he wants."

  "He can," said Macaffrey. "I suppose he thinks he wants me."

  "So you've reconsidered," I said. "Well, what choice you got. They've left for the weekend, but I can get them, explain you came back to see-"

  "To see you," he said. I hoped I wasn't blushing, but my skin reddens even when someone calls me by my first name. Craning my head, I looked at anything but Macaffrey. When I was young and visited the city with my parents, I remembered how I could look down any of the cross streets and see a river; I glanced into an alley-wide street whose vista was not of water, but the wall of a riverside tower resembling twenty thousand elevator buttons stacked one atop the other.

  "Why?"

  "We have a mutual interest."

  Thus far he differed from other men I'd known only in that he apparently believed what he said at all times, and not solely when it was convenient. "I am sorry you lost your job. Those poor children-"

  "They'll be all right," he said. "My job's just starting." A trace of disappointment in his voice made me aware of his sorrow; his sadness over not having yet been able to hook me, I thought it. The street we traveled ended at the island's toe. Battery Park's old trees were cut down by the Army so that mortars might be strategically aimed in the event Long Islanders attacked by sea. The floodwall started rising soon after, and now the guns pointed directly at downtown's only defense against the water. Sirens' sound echoed across the ocean air; damp salt breezes wafted over the wall, bearing dry leaves from trees far afield, their currents rich with smells of rain and oil and dead fish.

  "What do you mean?" I asked. "Your job at Dryco?"

  "I'll help you see what I mean," he said, lifting his arm before me as if to restrain me from flying away too soon. "Take my hand."

  There it was: the sly valentine hand-drawn in crayon, the first shake of the buck's antlers, the molester's unwrapping of the lollipop. Southerners wasted no time, I thought, recalling Thatcher's unctuous chivalry during our first month together, before events slid my being from his mind's upper slot. Men behaved so perfectly until their attention spans failed them.

  "Why?"

  "To see something pretty." Pressing my hand into his, I marveled at how willfully I fell into any new trap. Then, as if in brownout, all city light dimmed, outshone by the sky as it unexpectedly took fire. Over upper New York harbor no spires or towers disrupt the view of heaven's bowl; I stared freely into its millions from below, gazing up into the crowd as if into a tornado, a mandala, a spiral of DNA. In the midst of the angels' hurricane was an eye of blinding white light. I heard the angels' sight, saw their music as a sound like the roar of the sea in a shell. In knowing their movements I looked into the painful light for so long that I thought my own eyes might melt, but I couldn't turn away.

  "They figure it's what we'd expect," he said. "I'm sure it's different in reality. Sometimes you'll hear music, too. They like Wagner."

  I let go his hand; the vision faded as it came. The street's chiaroscuro reappeared beneath New York's sky, free once more of angels as it was forever free of oxygen, or stars. Others passing along their nightly circuits appeared to have seen no more than the sidewalk lying before their shoes; New Yorkers looked up only to see what might be falling toward them. Looking at Macaffrey, I thought I'd never felt so secure in my fear. "Call me Lester, Joanna," he said. "I don't hold much with labels."

  FOUR

  "You'll see me home?" I asked, knowing he'd agree. A million words raced around our silence as we sailed uptown between Broadway's palisades. In our day the thumbrule was that bony lies became truth rich and strange if the need for belief was great enough. A child might rub her stuffed animals bald, trying to wish them into life; what if she started with a sleeping pet? Reality was never so flexible in fact as in theory. Angels, I told myself: there could have been nothing to see; all was but a blend of sky and delusion.

  Closing my eyes, I still saw angels. Why was I chosen to receive revelation? It made as little sense as those stories of flying saucers landing on lonely Nebraska prairies, desiring that farm girls alone should know the secrets between stars. That I liked being with Lester held nothing of heaven.

  "That fellow you came to the school with," he said. "You were lovers once?" From distant Brooklyn came the sound of bundled papers being thrown onto a newstand's curb, the nightly cannonade. No doubt I'd opened my mind wide enough that Lester might now easily slip himself in.

  "You couldn't know that-"

  "It's in the way you stood next to him," he said. "The tilt of your pelvis. It's all in the details. Let's go this way."

  We headed west down Rector Street; Trinity Church's encircling boneyard was on our right, bright beneath floodlamp glare; arcs hung from the trees, appearing as fruit passed over at harvest time. The yard's retaining wall rose higher as the street sloped toward the unseeable Hudson River. Turning north again we passed beneath a slender wrought-iron brid
ge arching above the street, running from the cemetery to an office building, as if the sextons, foreseeing Doomsday, provided for the dead a short walk between grave and Workfare office.

  "You broke up with him awhile back?" Lester asked.

  "It was a work relationship. We got overinvolved. Not long after we started there. Our jobs got in the way. His job."

  "What happened?"

  "We had this awful conversation one night," I said. "I called him a golem. Worse than that. We kept talking and stayed friends, but the moment passed." Midtown's distant lights enflamed Manhattan's sky until it appeared no less bloody than Long Island's. The breath of the underworld rose through cracks in the pavement. The Trade Towers stood on our left beyond a low wall of outbuildings. Soldiers guarding the plaza searched and taunted a man delivering pizzas; a lateworker's dinner always arrived cold. "Why am I telling you this?"

  "I asked," he said. "Seems so quiet down here at night. Like the old days. Army's really necessary still?"

  "Seen as necessary," I said. "Thatcher gets nervous unless he's surrounded."

  "Except when he's with you?" Lester asked, no trace of malice in his question. By moving farther from him, I thought, I could keep him from driving deeper into my mind, deliberately forgetting that I walked with one who showed me God's lack of face.

  "Please stop," I said.

  "I read people well," he said. "I wish I was illiterate."

  "It's as if you've had me investigated," I said. "Watching me come and go and I never knew it. It's an awful feeling-"

  "Do you hate me as much as you hate him?" A third pair of feet paused, a second after ours, the sound adding a grace note to our chord. A soldier, I thought, seeing no one; a worker, some clerk leaving a store. A nominal curfew was on; as a Dryco exec I could have probably stepped to the curb and hailed a tank, had I wanted. We continued uptown through ever-darker streets. Helicopters flew over, thrashing the city with sticks of light, searching out those with whom they refused to share hegemony. Wind glued newspapers to our ankles as we walked, losing the day's words.