The Gimmicks

by Chris McCormick

  “Right,” a few of them said at once, reinvigorated.

  Avo couldn’t recall any mention of a professor. He considered asking for clarification but decided just to pick up the facts as they developed. He joined the men at their chalkboard, and they all seven got to work.

  Everything Avo knew about Professor Marlon Tanaka came from the perfectly square text of biography found underneath his photograph in the back of a textbook. Avo had imagined an old man in a white beard, but the professor in question was only a decade older than he was.

  Born in Burbank in 1945, Tanaka was conceived while his parents were detained at Manzanar. In 1961 he left Southern California for early enrollment at Berkeley, where he befriended Mario Savio and took part in the Free Speech Movement. In 1965 he returned south to begin his doctoral work at UCLA in Late Ottoman history, shirking the expectations of his advisers that he’d pursue Japanese studies. “I looked at the faculty list for each department,” he said in one interview, “and it was very clear that like with like was buried there. Arabs studying Arabs, Chinese studying Chinese. I thought, Perhaps I’ve discovered a source of our problems. And so I declared: Let there be a student one day who learns about Turks from a man named Tanaka!”

  Here is what those students learned: As the empire was falling, Armenian loyalties—already teetering between the Russians and the Ottomans—landed treasonously with the Russians at the Battle of Sarikamish. This, followed by what Tanaka called the “rebellion” in Van, led to a civil war within the even messier context of the first burgeoning world war. Many Armenians—though far fewer, Tanaka claimed, than most Western historians alleged—were killed, but there were bad people on both sides, and many virtuous Turks were also killed in the haze of war. An unfortunate—but justifiable!—wash.

  Avo had never met a denier. He’d never seen their lies so clearly laid out, and he could hardly believe his eyes. How could a thirty-one-year-old wunderkind, an assistant professor at a world-renowned university, be so irresponsible with the truth? How many scholars, Avo wondered, had tried to explain how the Armenians in Turkey had already been subjected to the Hamidian massacres some twenty-five years before the genocide? How many scholars had brought to Tanaka’s very corridor (the ninth floor of Bunche Hall) the private letters and public decrees of the three Ottoman pashas, proof of Talaat Bey’s orchestration of the deportations and forced marches, proof of the concealment of the exterminations? There was proof. But that’s how denial worked. Every structure of truth provides a new shadow to scurry to. No evidence could matter.

  Jart. The shattering—that was what Avo’s parents used to call the genocide, and it made sense to him that another shattering was what it would take for the world to acknowledge it, too.

  For the next two months, the warehouse men took shifts tracking the professor. They would do this—from his office to his classrooms to his home—mapping out the particulars of his routine. Avo, whose size made him too conspicuous, was relegated to watching the professor on campus. He had to take a bus to Westwood and call one of his colleagues from a pay phone whenever Tanaka left the history department building. Avo found it to be an oddly serene task, like meditation, staring at the doors for the little man to exit and scamper across the bright university. Avo had learned the layout at UCLA well enough through blueprints and books, but he couldn’t have guessed its beauty. The city smog lifted miraculously there, and the gray blade of the sky buckled to reveal the white-rimmed leaves of London planes against the sun. He had killed a man once, but not on purpose, and the slow unfolding of this new crime had him craving beauty. For example, he saw the coral trees lining the walkways of campus as writhing, arthritic fingers, and he imagined complex histories for the students and families and occasional bicyclists zipping by along the curving paths near his bench.

  There he sat, watching the doors of Bunche Hall, an ugly gray building pockmarked by black square windows jutting out like the buttons on a television remote. The home of the history department reminded him, fittingly, of the Communist apartment complexes of his childhood, all slate and futureless. It was the perfect kind of building from which to look back, to obsess over the past, to end a love affair, or—as seventeen students had in the past decade, according to one book—to leap to one’s death.

  Valantin spilled her coffee all over his week’s homework. He’d summarized an American children’s story and had written something of a sequel. From what Valantin could salvage of it, she was impressed. His understanding of English was coming along very nicely, she said, but sooner or later, he was going to have to get comfortable speaking it with people.

  “What do you do for a job?” she asked in both languages.

  Avo said, “I work in a warehouse,” the answer Ruben had given him to practice.

  “That won’t do,” Valantin said. “That’s quiet, lonely work. You need to interact with people.”

  “He can work here,” her aunt said from the safe. “Your sons are never coming by the way they used to.”

  But Valantin said Avo would speak only Armenian in a place like this. She thought for another minute and then asked Avo to lean in so she could whisper in English.

  “Don’t tell my aunt, but sometimes I enjoy going to this place in Hollywood. A bar. Anyway, I know the bartender there. He’ll take one look at you and give you a job at the door.”

  “The Doors?” Avo said, strumming an invisible guitar.

  “No, not the Doors. The door—of the bar. They call the job a bouncer. Check ID, break up fights. Easy for a man your size.”

  “I don’t know, Valantin-jan. I’m busy at the warehouse.”

  “It’ll replace your homework, and it’s only Friday nights. Once a week. Good practice. I’ll pick you up this Friday, seven o’clock. Yes?”

  Over by the safe, her aunt was washing the pet dog’s paws with a wet cloth. Avo brushed his eyebrow back with his thumb and told Valantin, in English, “I’m thanking you.”

  Between his taxi rides from Glendale to Westwood to Hollywood and back, Avo was beginning to feel like a real Angeleno. He could smell the difference in neighborhoods, the citrus and tobacco sting of Little Armenia or the hollow smell of spilled liquor near downtown. He imagined writing about it to Mina, and he imagined her replying, asking if, despite everything, he still smelled like rain.

  Probably he smelled worse than that. He’d begun working the last-call shift at The Gutshot two nights a week, and although checking for ID was the face of the gig, Valantin hadn’t detailed the full extent of the job. Most of his time was spent scrubbing the toilets and sinks, mopping the tiles of vomit and liquor, and washing the mop clean of what he’d just wiped from the floor.

  So he smelled worse, probably, than rain, but at least his English was getting better. The bartender who’d hired him had quit drinking years ago and served his customers with a kind of gentle understanding that Avo found disarming. Longtin could tell when a person was drunk about three drinks before anyone else could. Avo suspected it was the relative silence placed on him by the language barrier that allowed Longtin to take a liking to him.

  Sometimes a group of girls would flirt, and sometimes a curious woman would tell him exactly what she wanted to try with him. But in all his nights at The Gutshot, he always said, “I have a woman, bro. Thank you, bro, but I have a woman.”

  Meanwhile, the men in the warehouse were itching to act on the professor. “How long has it been since they sent us here to do a job,” one of them complained, “and why don’t they just let us do it already?” But the order had to come in from Paris—or Beirut, or Madrid, or Moscow, or wherever Hagop Hagopian and Ruben happened to be—and in the meantime, all the warehouse men could do was wait. “I’m getting bored following this little Japanese professor around L.A.,” said one of the men, and the others agreed.

  For Avo, the problem with the delay had nothing to do with boredom. It had something to do with himself, the ways in which he could feel himself changing. The vision he’d trust
ed on the way to America had by now been frayed by doubt. The morale in the warehouse, which had peaked early on, was gone. Nothing—no Turkish acknowledgment—had come of their work. Avo was tired of waiting in a manure facility along a dying river for the world to change, for Mina to be able to join him. He was tired of his job at The Gutshot, too, soaking up what the body rejects. He was tired of being a million kilometers away from the tallest building in Kirovakan and the woman who lived inside.

  Increasingly often, Avo found his mind wandering in those warehouse meetings and on UCLA’s campus, composing whole letters he would write to Mina detailing their future together.

  Sometimes in the responses he imagined her writing, she would beg him to tell her the truth about Tigran. I know you did it, he imagined in her handwriting. Just tell me and I’ll forgive you. Just tell me, and our split will end.

  But even in make-believe, he lied and lied and lied.

  In the warehouse, the men imagined what they’d do to the professor. The rumor among them was that Hagopian had hired a man somewhere in the Mediterranean who tortured Turks the way their ancestors had been tortured, using the exact instruments and techniques. They wanted to do the same to this professor, peel back his fingernails, or whip his feet, or march him out into the desert until he blistered and collapsed and split open. Just north of Los Angeles were countless acres of the untamed Mojave, the closest thing they had to the Syrian desert and the concentration camp at Deir ez-Zor. Maybe they could film the professor recanting his lies and admitting he’d been paid by the Turkish government to spread denialism in the United States. They would share the video with news outlets. They would show the world that the evil of the crime was perfected by its denial.

  When they spoke, the men sounded the way people in freezing conditions might speak about summer, and afterward there fell a wide, shameful stretch of silence between them. It was as if, just by imagining it so vividly, they’d already done the torture, and Avo wondered if the real thing would only feel redundant.

  Whenever Ruben called, he lovingly rambled on about his exploits in Europe and the Middle East. Despite his electrified focus on his own adventures abroad, Ruben’s familiar voice came like a salve to Avo’s homesickness through the telephone speaker. Without mentioning names, Ruben would extol the vision of Hagop Hagopian, the depth of loyalty he felt among the men he was stationed alongside, and the swelling sense of purpose driving him. All his life, he’d been at the mercy of his circumstances, at the mercy of history, and now history seemed as alterable as a poorly fitting suit. It was the feeling of being a man, Ruben claimed, no longer a boy, which is what most men remained forever. He assumed Avo was feeling the same way, out in Los Angeles. Like a man, wasn’t he?

  And for a while, Avo was—or at least he said so. Over the last few conversations, his feigned enthusiasm had begun to wear through, and he’d even asked, futilely, if he could take a break from Los Angeles to visit home. In a patient tone, Ruben explained how dangerous it would be—not only for Avo but for everyone, everyone back home—to remain in touch, let alone return.

  “Not too much longer from now,” he said, “we’ll be able to go back, and we’ll be hailed as heroes when we do.”

  “I miss the past,” Avo said before realizing that missing the past was what missing was. How could he explain to his brother that he had made a mistake in coming to Los Angeles? That he wished he was still working in the same factory he’d worked in before leaving home, was still with the girl he’d loved since fifteen? How could he tell his brother, a man of ideas who wanted to correct history, that his only ambition was to revive his?

  After a silence, Ruben said, “I know who you miss.” Through his ceiling, Avo could hear the neighbors laughing.

  Ruben went on, “We’re almost there, brother. I have a big job coming up very soon over here, but once that’s done, I’ll ask for a transfer. Okay? I’ll join you in Los Angeles, and we’ll run things out there together. And we’ll send for her to join us. What, you don’t believe me? I’ll send you something in the mail you can hold on to until you see her again. Something that will make the wait worthwhile.”

  In the next days, just after the gift arrived, the men in the warehouse got the call they’d been waiting for, and Avo knew his conversation with Ruben had sped up the decision. The men in the warehouse celebrated. Finally—no more following the mundane life of the professor of denial.

  Finally—the operation was set to go. Two of the men would wait for the professor at his home, wait for him to get out of the car, and smuggle him back to the warehouse. There, Avo and the others would be waiting, making sure no one had followed. The plan was set for a Thursday night, less than a week in advance. The men—including Avo—toasted. Finally, they would be doing what they had volunteered to do.

  “Don’t call me bro,” Valantin said on Sunday. “Other than that, your English is becoming superb.”

  “Super?”

  “Superb.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “One has a b at the end of it.”

  “Why?”

  Valantin squinted. “Mokor-jan,” she called out to her aunt. “Bring us the cognac.”

  They spoke in both languages until Avo asked if Valantin had heard about these Armenians in Lebanon and France who were using violence to remind the world of the genocide.

  “These idiots,” Valantin said. “Who raised them? What kind of mothers did they have? No brains. They’re just as bad as the Turks, is what I think.”

  “You’re wrong,” her aunt said from the counter. “I don’t care what he does, no Armenian compares to the Turks.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Valantin said, “but these idiots are not real Armenians, in my opinion. Would you both agree? No real Armenian would kill another person, no matter what. It’s not Christian, it’s not in our blood. We’re a peaceful people.”

  “But sometimes,” her aunt said, “to protect the family . . .”

  “Okay, yes, a man comes with a gun to your home, you can defend yourself. But a man comes to your great-grandfather’s home sixty years ago, and you blow up a bomb in a market full of people? That’s not protection. That’s not what a real Armenian does.”

  “But they haven’t blown up a bomb in a market full of people,” her aunt said. “They’ve only targeted ambassadors of Turkey, political representatives.”

  “Still.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Well, what do you think, Avo?” Valantin asked. “Gisht’em? Am I right? Or are you on my mokor’s side?”

  “It’s terrible,” Avo said. “All of it is terrible, bro.”

  “We can all agree on that,” Valantin said. “But don’t call me bro.”

  Over the weekend, Avo broke up seven fights and a couple having sex in the bathroom. And a man—some might say middle-aged or old, others stately—this stately man with long bleached hair and tattoos on his arms, well, he struck up a conversation. And before Avo knew it, he was being offered another job. He ignored the man in the ponytail until he realized the opportunity he was being presented.

  Wrestling, but for show. And the job would involve living on the road for the foreseeable future, inventing whole new identities, and living as secretly as possible. He could save money in the meantime, to return home to Mina.

  “Let’s say noon, bro,” Avo said, because what he planned to do would take up the morning, and Angel Hair pumped his hand.

  At 11:45 the next morning, Avo went to a pay phone near The Gutshot. He remembered the numbers he’d scratched into the back of a history textbook, just beneath the square of text that made up the author’s biography. As he dialed, he imagined where the numbers led, down the wire into the walls of The Gutshot, up to the crucifixes lining the street, the telephone poles that connected to the roof of his apartment building, where he’d once seen a bird nesting. Two by two, he’d lifted the children of his neighbors onto his shoulders to see. Now he imagined the call traveling from the bar to
the wires of that nest, around and around, until a home was made of his voice, and then up through the cables leaving the city, winding in silence along Forest Lawn Drive, past the famous cemetery where the bones of old Hollywood lay rotting, past the overlook to the Bowl, where a concert raged in electric neon streamers, past the limits of the city and up through the Valley and on into the Vasquez Rocks, those jagged slabs of sediment thrust from the earth by the grinding plates of the San Andreas Fault. The one time he’d followed the professor to his home out there, Avo had passed those rocks, had felt the unnerving effect of history flaunting itself like that, in layers and layers and out in the open, twenty-five million years of sawtoothed fact just sitting there, waiting, the disinterested teeth of time. And now he imagined his voice trundling down the wires into the house near the rocks, and the voice from the other end racing up and back to him.

  “I hear you,” the voice said. “Who is this?”

  “Thursday night, bro. You are careful. Okay?”

  “Excuse me? Who is this?”

  Avo considered how to say hapshtakum. Person theft. “You are the professor, yeah? They are following you, bro. They’re planning Thursday night.”

  “Is this a joke? Am I supposed to laugh or be afraid?”

  A problem of fluency, Avo thought, the distance between his heart and his words. His lack of confidence in the language turned every word he said into satire. “You lie with the genocide, bro, I hate you, why you’re lying I don’t know, killing families again forever and forever, very evil,” he said, bunching the metal cord in his fist. “But I’m calling you anyway. My thinking is like that, bro, to be killing you is wrong.”

  And before Tanaka could thank him or curse him, Avo placed the phone gingerly back on its receiver. He’d had to lurch and bend to fit inside that phone booth. Now he head-butted the glass once, twice, before unfurling himself to leave.

  In the distance, double-parked along a curb as red as the fanny pack he’d put Ruben’s gift inside, Angel Hair was waving his hand out of the driver’s side window of his station wagon, and Avo walked toward the glowing curb, and didn’t stop for two whole years.