9.
Chicago
was a nightmare. Disgusting, filthy. People shitting against walls, squatting
in gutters, bundles of cloth piled on the ground and I think they used to be
people. I’m on a bus now, heading east, and there are Army Humvees ahead and
behind of us, we’re rolling through Ohio like it’s a demilitarized zone.
Somehow I feel like things will be better when we cross the border into New
York, and this is the first time in my life I’ve ever thought entering Buffalo
would be a positive thing, but I was born in New York, and somehow I feel like
they’re still my people and they will rally.
I know
New York. I need New York. You know I need unique New York.
The guy
next to me is Steve, and he says that it’s not this bad everywhere. He says the
train stations and bus depots are hot spots, people flocked to them, hoping to
get somewhere safer, and when they realized there was no such thing as safer,
they just… sat down.
And the
90 is bad because it’s a main artery, it’s where the money is, it’s how the
people with money get from A to B, from east to west and back again. People
with money. People like me.
I should
feel bad that I’m better off, the Catholic in me knows that, but I don’t. I don’t
want to be in those gutters. Maybe that makes me a bad person, maybe it’s just
one of the many things that makes me a bad person, and I’ve never been in a
fight in my life, not a real one, but if someone tried to take what I’ve got I’d
fight for it. Just thinking about it puts a charge in my guts.
And I’d
win that fight, right? Of course I would. I’m special. I can’t throw a punch, I’ve
never been hit, everything I know about self-defense I learned with a bucket of
popcorn on my lap, but somehow I know that if I had to, if I was pushed to, I’d
be some sort of instant badass, That Guy You’d Never Suspect.
It is a
joke and I know it, but it might be the only thing that keeps me from wetting
myself right now. I have to feel like there’s some barrier between my life and
theirs, like there’s some force somehow keeping me from taking a bad step and
falling through a rotten floorboard.
And I can
look back on my life, and I can weigh the good against the bad, and I can twist
it so the former outweighs the later. It boils down to those Good Deeds, the
ones I’ve done, the ones everyone like me has done, those discrete moments of
time when you decide to stop and give a shit, and then walk away a few dollars
lighter, patting yourself on the back. Those prove I deserve to be okay. Right?
But
weighed against the rest of it, the mundane, day-in and day-out habit of total
indifference, of not even seeing, much less caring, those little bright spots
are just punctuation in a page full of inhumanity, just little pauses in an
otherwise unchecked sprint to a single conclusion: I am a sucky human being.
This bus
is carting me toward my fate. My comeuppance. My just desserts. I don’t know
what I’ll find when I get home, but I’m pretty sure it’s going to destroy me.
10.
“Please,
help yourself.”
Wendy
smiled, politely, at the receptionist. She might as well have offered up a bowl
of fabric softener. At least she could use fabric softener. The bowl of
brightly colored gobs of sugar, chemical flavorings, and lab-generated colors
were an abstraction of food to her, as separate from her biological process as
one of those god-awful Chiluly pieces Susan had a thing for. Wendy hadn’t had a
carb since the Bush administration, and her last piece of candy? Christ, what,
grade school?
She
demurred, shook her head, politely, and said “I’m on a diet.”
The
receptionist, all three-hundred pounds of her, smiled sympathetically. “I know,”
she said. “I shouldn’t even have these.” Then she leaned forward
conspiratorially and added “I eat most of them myself.”
No
fucking shit. What was she looking for, absolution? Try making different
choices, you weak-willed clusterfuck of a cow.
But she
smiled and nodded, woman to woman, the transaction complete. If there was one
thing she had learned the hard way, and taught others the brutally hard way in
turn, it was that you always pay your dues to the gatekeepers. It didn’t matter
if they were an admin at the White House or the hostess at an iHop. The
gatekeepers see everything, know everything, and they control access. Wars have
been lost because admins were paid to misdirect communiques. Scandals that
could have changed the course of history have been buried under the simple act
of turning down a phone call. The most powerful person in the land is not the
king. It’s the person who controls the king’s calendar.
Malinda
Whateverthefuckherlastnameis was a person to be courted, flattered, endured,
humored. Malinda would be useful, would be used, gladly, happily, would skip and
cartwheel toward getting used, as long as Wendy laid this groundwork first.
Wendy knew she was beautiful, paid dearly to be fashionable, and worked
relentlessly to be leaner and tougher than a steel beam. People who looked like
her weren’t nice to people who looked like Malinda, but that was because most
people who looked like her were fucking idiots. They didn’t know the value of a
well-placed stooge.
So they
chatted, and Wendy did grant her that absolution of a sort, she smiled, shook
her head, pouted in commiseration. She’d met enough losers, or worse, people
with potential who let themselves lose, to know how to playact. Yes, it was
tough sticking to a diet (it wasn’t.) Yes, men did have it easier (that one was
true, but that advantage made them soft. She had yet to meet a man she couldn’t
own after three minutes of quiet observation.) No, she hadn’t seen last night’s
Dr. Phil, but she was certain he must
have been every bit as insightful as Malinda claimed (seriously, this was how
they broke terror suspects. They made them talk to Malinda about Dr. Fucking
Phil.)
The
minutes crawled by, they dragged themselves by, agonizingly, the skin on their
bellies worn through and their guts trailing out in a bloody tangle behind
them.
But at
last, Don had an opening. Oh Don. Poor, poor, pathetic Don. He smiled as he
waved her in, and she smiled back. Poor Don.
She sat
in the chair across from his desk and noted the bad springs in the seat. She
took in the room in one gulp, the fishing photos, faded with age, back when his
hair was still dark and all accounted for. Pictures of his kids, but also old.
Certificates and trophies and awards, dusty with age. A man whose best years
were behind him. She was almost sorry about how easy this was going to be.
“So, what
can I do for you?” Don asked.
Wendy leaned
forward, smiled. She had already won. The next hour would just be going through
the motions. “I was going to ask you the same thing, Don.”
