by Matt Dean
"Reprehensible son of a bitch," Martin said.
"What can I do?" I said. "Anything? I could go to the floor and-and lobby some of the-."
"Forget it, Jonah. It's over. It's a conference committee report. They can't amend it, and they can only vote yea or nay. They're not going to scuttle the whole bill to save us. If you have any vacation time coming, I suggest you take it."
Gently I pressed the button that connected us to Thorstensen's voice. His voice stilled. Static cleared from the line. "Thanks. I will."
"Thank you for everything," Martin said. "It's been a pleasure working with you."
Tears pricked the corners of my eyes. "Same here. I wouldn't change it."
Gingerly I replaced the handset. For some lost length of time I sat staring into empty space. Brothers in Christ, I thought. Brothers in fucking Christ.
Again I dialed the session number. Busy.
I kept a name tag in my pencil drawer. It was all I needed to get onto the House floor. I pinned it to my breast pocket. My footsteps echoed darkly in the dark tunnel. I ran. How long since I had run? As I mounted the last long hill into the Capitol, my heart pounded and my lungs fought for air.
In the short corridor to the elevators, I launched myself into the midst of a gaggle of tiny blue-haired ladies. Backing out, I dodged a bewildered-looking page with a Rubbermaid cart full of manila folders. I ran for the stairs.
I found myself on the Capitol's ground floor. All around me, above me, voices echoed against stone and plaster. The voices of people talking, of televisions playing the session debate, of someone speaking-no, preaching-through an amplifier or bullhorn.
"God takes a hand in the affairs of men and the governments of men," I heard. "This is a critical time, but we have confidence that God will prevail. What is right will prevail."
At the top of the stairs from the ground floor to the first floor, I stumbled headlong into the rotunda. In frescoes high above me, Greek demigods discovered and settled the land of ten thousand lakes-or so I had always guessed. I paused a moment, looking at painting of a pale blond man. Except for a sash of blue cloth, he was completely naked. It seemed that the blue sash had, however improbably, blown in on a breeze to wrap itself around his leg and cover his genitals. The man reached his hand out to a woman clad in a filmy green shift. Was she levitating above the grass? What the hell-?
I shook my head. "Focus," I said aloud. "Focus."
On either side of the rotunda, curving marble staircases rose to the chambers. But which-? No matter. I took the nearest.
Columns of marble-white and reddish gray-rose to a barrel-vaulted skylight. At the top of the stairs, a door stood open on the Senate chambers, a study in shades of red. Red carpeting, red seats in the gallery, red and pink marble columns on either side of the dais.
The stone hallways buzzed with whispered conversations. Men and women in suits and clattering hard-soled shoes milled about with briefcases and Day Runners and cellular phones as big and heavy-looking as cement blocks. They smelled of money, these men and women.
I slipped into the House chambers the back way, past the House Desk. I knew some of the staffers from our forums. Ignoring faces smiling in recognition and frowning in bewilderment, passing the huge whirring dumb waiter that served up the thousand latest versions of a thousand different bills, I placed myself at the threshold of the chamber. On the green carpet the representatives' tiny pulpits spun themselves into a semicircular web.
Someone from the majority-a tall, gaunt black man in a tight brown suit-held the floor. I didn't know him. He spoke in the breathy whisper of flute and fife. All he seemed to get from his microphone was feedback.
No sign of Thorstensen. I ducked my head in further. The Speaker, a slim and dapper man named Packer, held the gavel.
A page carrying an enormous stack of green-jacketed bills brushed past me. His eyes narrowed, his jaw worked itself. Of course, of course. I was dressed like a truck driver, like a convenience store cashier, like an off-duty janitor. I didn't look like someone who should be standing here at the door of the House chambers.
Either my glower overmatched the page's or he saw my name tag; without a word he scurried to the dais at the front of the chamber.
And there. There stood Thorstensen, to the right of the dais, laughing with some crony in a wide orange-checked tie. The page approached the trademark red vest with something like awe. The small boy tendered to the great man the green jackets. Thorstensen waved him away. In doing so, somehow, Thorstensen's eyes found mine. He grinned. He waved.
I said, quite aloud, "Brothers in Christ."
Thorstensen put his hand to his ear, made a show of not hearing.
But suddenly the floor was abuzz. The chief clerk brayed the House into order.
"A roll call vote has been requested," Packer said. "Seeing twenty hands-." Covering his microphone, he leaned forward to hear the chief clerk. "Representative Gertz, a roll call vote is automatic on a conference committee report. There will be a roll call vote."
Gertz, the man in the tight brown suit, said, "Thank you, Mister Speaker."
"The clerk will call the roll."
Thorstensen had returned to his chair. He pressed a button on his desk that lit his name on the tote board. "Brothers in Christ," he said-or rather, that's what I thought he said. I couldn't hear him.
The board was green from top to bottom. Beside Gertz's name stood the only nay.
We were abolished.
* * *
Eliot's number again rang through to the recording, to his answering machine.
I called Luther. I heard paper rattling in the background. "What's wrong?" he said. "You sound upset."
"The vandal again. A night raid."
He cleared his throat. "What happened?"
"I'm sorry to say this, but I think I need to just move on. This kind of thing will keep happening until I do. Of course I'll pay for the windows-. You can take it out of my half of the deposit, and send Tom's half to-."
"Tenant, tenant, tenant." With each repetition his voice grew louder. "What happened to the windows?"
"Someone scratched graffiti into them."
"What does it say?"
"You don't want to know."
"Have you called the police? Do you want me to call the police?"
"I don't know what they'll be able to do. I doubt they'll put a couple of detectives on it."
"Let me try, at least. I'll call. Give me your number at work, in case they want to talk to you."
An hour or more passed, and I heard from neither Luther nor the police. There was no point in staying. I might as well go home.
Many papers and books covered the surface of my desk. Reports, forum notes, academic journals, drafts and revisions and revisions of revisions of our harassment policy. I couldn't envision wanting any of it.
Someone would have to clear it away, eventually. I should, at least, clean my desk before I left. I sat staring at the mess, wondering if-and why-I should bother.
The phone rang. I wondered if-and why-I should bother answering.
I answered.
"Success, my boy. Success." It was Thorstensen.
"Success? What-? What was that stuff about M-E-N and F-E-M? No one ever-. And you just eliminated my job. How is that-?"
He chuckled. "Quite the contrary. We moved your job. The LCC position is for you."
"For me? The LCC position-. What about Martin?"
"Isn't he some sort of Hindu?" He pronounced "Hindu" as if, loosely translated, it meant "ravenous eater of excrement."
"I believe he's a Buddhist."
"Well, son, is there a difference?"
He gave a hearty laugh. I waited for him to stop.
"I only have a freshman-year survey course to go on," I said, "but I believe it's like this. The Buddhists believe that suffering is inseparable from existence, but that a state of enlightenment beyond suffering can be attained through the extinction of the self and bodily desires.
The Hindus believe that you will be a cockroach in the next life."
I slammed the phone down.
I took my jacket, and I left.
* * *
From a distance nothing seemed to be amiss. In the slanted light of afternoon, the scarred windows appeared normal. I saw no signs of further meddling. I wondered, for a second, if I'd somehow imagined the whole thing.
But no. No, I hadn't imagined it. Up close, the windows showed deep scratches.
DIE FAGGOT
IF YOU HATE EVIL KILL FAGS
With exquisite care, as if it might give way, I mounted the stoop. I opened the front door. The air inside was dark and chill and stale. Normal. Everything appeared normal.
Shrugging off my jacket, I stole further into the house. Kitchen-clear. Bathroom-clear. I took a piss.
Bedroom. Not clear.
The windows on either side of the bed were jagged mouths of broken glass. Shards lay in the bed, carefully arranged, it seemed, in a circle pointing inward on a broad, flat rock and a crudely lettered scroll of cardboard. "DIE TONIGHT," it said.
I charged from the house. I left the front door banging behind me. I patted my pockets. Keys. Thank God, I still had my keys. I had neither my wallet nor my jacket, but I couldn't go back for them now. I just couldn't.
Thank God, too, I had filled my gas tank. But where could I go? It would be better to stay, to call 911 and wait for the police to do-what?-something-anything. But I couldn't. I just couldn't sit in that house and wait for my vandal to throw his next stone.
Eliot. I had to talk to Eliot, and from his house I could call Luther, and Luther could call the police.
It was by no means certain that Eliot would be home, I told myself. I hadn't been able to reach him yet today. There was no reason to believe that he was at home.
He was at home, though-or rather in his front yard. When I pulled to the curb in front of his house, he stood at the top of the concrete stairs.
Seeing me, he smiled. "I'm glad you're here," he said. "I've been expecting you."
* * *
29 - Dirty
Expecting me, he said, because of the messages I'd left on his answering machine. He led me into his living room-his front door stood open-and sat me on the sofa in front of the fire. The coffee table had disappeared, and he'd moved the sofa so that it sat barely a yard from the hearth. Tugging his pant legs, he sat on the stone to face me. Our knees nearly touched.
"I'm sorry I wasn't here when you called," Eliot said. "I had a doctor's appointment, some other errands."
One of the errands must have been fetching things from his office. A stack of file boxes, I saw now, sat against the wall, just inside the entryway.
Smiling, he laid his hand on my knee. "Doesn't it help just to get next to the fire? That's why I moved the sofa. Do you like it?"
An odd tangent, I thought, and in truth the heat of the fire was oppressive, but I nodded. He couldn't seem to stop grinning. Maybe it made him very happy indeed to have a fire in the hearth.
He said, "You said on the phone something happened. Tell me about it."
Where to begin? I'd started the day with a keen sense of its glad possibilities. So far it had, instead, been a thoroughgoing disaster. I told him the story, ending with the glass in my bed.
By then Eliot had turned to stoke the fire. "Do you expect to go to heaven?" he said.
Heaven. I'd heard so little about heaven, so much about hell. And this seemed like a very odd time for the topic to arise. "I suppose so. Why?"
He looked at me over his shoulder. "If you're going to heaven, rather than staying here, wouldn't it be better to go tonight rather than twenty years from tonight?"
"Is that supposed to comfort me?" I heard the hardness in my own voice. "If so, it's not working."
Eliot laid aside the iron poker. He turned once more to face me. "It's supposed to make you think, Jonah Thomas Murray." As he spoke each of my names, he touched the center of my chest. "You're thinking of today and tonight. I'm trying to make you think of a thousand years from now, and a million." Leaning back, he flung his arms wide. "A trillion years from now, when you're at God's right hand"-he showed me his, Eliot's, right hand, landing it on my thigh, nearly in my crotch-"singing his praises in the golden light of countless days, will you even remember the glass in your bed? What will it signify?"
"When you put it like that-."
He took his hand away. "Who will decide when it's your time to go? Some skulking vandal, or the Lord and Creator of all?"
"Certainly when it's my time, it's my time, but-."
Turning to one side, so that he sat with one hip along the edge of the hearth, he looked into the fire. "Still, having said all of that, I don't think you should go back there."
How many hours had I spent here, by this fire, talking to Eliot? The two of us alone, or in group-how many hours? I couldn't begin to count the number of hours, and yet none of them had been as odd as these five or ten minutes had been. He might almost be speaking a different language-Swahili, Esperanto, Romanian.
He said, "There's no point in staying where you know there's danger."
"But all that stuff about-. What you were just saying-."
He rolled his eyes. "Let me start again. You drive every day?"
"Of course."
"You know there are risks? An eighteen-wheeler could come barreling out of nowhere and flatten your little Chevette and you along with it."
He waited. Looking at him askance, I nodded.
"You don't stop driving, because you know that whatever will be will be. If today is the day God calls you home, and he sends an eighteen-wheeler to do the work, so be it."
"I'm having trouble following this. What does this have to do-?"
Laying his hand on my shoulder, he leaned forward. "My point is this. You don't stop driving, because you have faith that you are being watched over. But you also don't drive into brick walls just to see if your guardian angels are on their toes."
"I have nowhere else to go. My mother probably isn't speaking to me now, so I have no family. As of today, I have no job."
"You have a place to go. To come. You can come here."
"Here?" I looked around. Baroque mirror, humble ladder-backed chairs, rocaille side tables. "With you? I can't impose on you like that."
I stood. I slid past him. I went to look at the Redlin print. It was like a dream, that print. The happy figures posed happily around a happy fire on a happy snowdrift at the edge of a happy forest. It was a scene from a world that had never existed.
"It's not an imposition, not at all. I have plenty of room." He pointed to a door behind me. "The spare bedroom's right there. It even has its own bathroom."
"But it can't be appropriate for a client and-."
He raised his hand. "We are brothers in Christ before we are counselor and client."
"Brothers in Christ," I said. I couldn't help thinking of Thorstensen's gluttonous smile as he'd mouthed the words at me from the House floor.
"Just till you can find something new."
"I'll pay you rent."
He grinned. "So it's agreed."
"Sure," I said. "Okay."
I had nothing with me but the clothes on my back. I had to return to the house. As hungrily as my heart cried for Eliot to accompany me, I refused him when he offered. "I think I have to do this alone," I told him. "If I can't do this, what can I do? How can I face a job interview if I can't walk into my own house and pack my own belongings?"
He had not moved from the hearth. "I don't disagree."
"I need to have enough faith for that, at the very least."
"You're absolutely correct. While you're gone, I'll go and have a key made."
He walked me to the door. We stopped in the entryway. The file box on top of the stack was open. The box contained books, loose papers, a scattering of baseball cards. At the bottom I saw something familiar-a sheet of white paper that read, along the top, in blue, "Twin C
ities Mental Health Assistance Program." The form had been filled out. In the space marked "Last Name," there was a name. My name, in my own handwriting.
I leaned toward the box, reaching for the form. "Eliot, what-?"
Placing his hand in the small of my back, he nudged me toward the front door. "Everything's going to be all right, Jonah. You'll see."
* * *
I studied the house with exquisite care. It was just as I'd left it. No new graffiti, no bumper stickers, no nails in the door, no new mischief. But it had seemed so the last time, and then I'd found the broken windows.
I walked along the street on the westward side of the house. Here they were, then, the broken windows, hidden somewhat by an unruly boxwood. At the base of the hedge, where no grass had ever grown, footprints gouged and marred the soft earth. The wounds had scabbed over during the day, so that the craters were crusty and dark here, soft and slick there.
Standing on my toes, I stretched to see something through the windows' breach, some sign of movement or change. I saw shadows and gleams, nothing distinct.
A neighbor, walking her schnauzer, scowled at me as she tugged the quivering gray puppy across the street. It occurred to me that I should smile, that I should make some greeting, that I should assure her somehow that I belonged here. I couldn't-I couldn't bring myself to do any of those things. I ignored her.
I went inside. I'd left the front door unlocked. Of course, I remembered-I'd dashed from the house, I'd left the door open. Why not engrave some invitations? Jonah Thomas Murray is pleased to announce the availability of his humble abode for acts of vandalism and theft.
No dawdling. I needed clothes and a toothbrush. Everything else could wait. In the bedroom I averted my eyes from the bed. Through the broken windows I felt a breath, a chill, of evening.
Dumping my gym bag onto the floor of my closet, I reached for clothes-shirts, jeans, sweaters. I stuffed them into the bag. I went to the dresser, scooped underwear and socks into the duffel. Good. Zip.
In the bathroom I added to the bag my toothbrush and toothpaste, deodorant, shaving cream, razors, a bar of soap still in the box. The mirror showed a wildfire of red stubble across my scalp.
Enough. Eliot would have all the toiletries I would need. Or if not, toiletries were cheap. I needed to get out of here. I trembled. My heart pounded. I could hardly breathe. I needed to get out of here.
