What We Are (37 page)

“This is why you didn't go to the Point?”

“Honor, duty, country? I'd have been kicked out my plebian year like Poe. A matter of national security.”

“You flatter yourself, nephew. You're not that important.”

“I mean, how could I sign on as a cadet this late into our story? By 1996? Even back then I had a laymen's grasp of the horrors committed by this nation. Which is mainly to say who got squashed along the way to easy living.”

“Yeah, well, someone afforded you the safety of easy living.”

“I know, I know. I'm just saying one thing. This is the nature of man: you acquire power. Constantly. However much melatonin you've got in your skin, whatever tribe you're from, American, non-American. Until you've got so much power you don't know what to do with it.”

“Why don't you give it up then?”

“It's not a good spot to be in. Everyone else wants what we've got.”

“They're already getting it.”

“Exactly. I'm saying, Uncle, that we're in decay. We've turned the scalpel on ourselves and are picking apart the monster—us—that we've created.”

My uncle goes quiet. The lingering dust in the air makes me think of some far-off place in the Midwest, a family pressed to their living room window, eyes on the storm in the distance. I pour a shot of the mystery liquor, sip it, and wait for a bite, for a word from my uncle, anything.

“You know,” he says, “I can see one night in particular. My second tour. We were on a hilltop somewhere, calling in air strikes. The sky was so wide open I felt warm almost, enlightened. Who knows, it maybe was nothing, but I remember thinking,
I'm on this side with these guys and that's it. This is the purest, realest, finest moment I will ever have
. Well, I been trying to get back to that place for a long time.

“I went to the rally today because he was one of ours. That's it, nephew, nothing more. All the stuff you're saying, while accurate, doesn't mean a thing to me. I drew my line a long time ago. I haven't always stayed faithful to it; I guess that's for me to figure out—to get
right some day. But I went to the rally for Tillman, his family, and this country, whatever it is.”

“Whatever it's become?” The dust cloud has finally lowered itself to this half-ass dock: I put my nose into my shirtsleeve, look over at my uncle.

“Yes,” he says, nodding.

The last answer provides us with real silence, the kind that comes in places that this lake was built to emulate. The water is stiller than a corpse, we're stiller than the water, two patients
etherized upon a table
.

“Should we toss our lines out again?” I ask.

“What would be the point of that?”

“Getting a new start on a bite.”

“Nephew, you only have so many new starts in this life before you have to live with it.”

That strikes me as being true.

“Listen,” he says. “I understand your crisis.”

“Yeah?”

“It's like you live in this moon zone without gravity. Floating from position to position.”

“
Eclectic
is the new chic word.”

“That's just a cryptic fancy way of saying
everything
. You believe in and want and can understand and are not concerned at all about everything.”

“I've been taught that all people are good and bad, equally generous and desirous.”

“What does that really mean, nephew?”

“I don't know. Maybe that I'm a hyperempathist or something.”

“Hyperempathists have no allegiance.”

“There isn't anyone whose shoes I can't imagine being in.”

“That doesn't mean you can really fill them.”

“Let me put it this way: I view some guy from Sunnyvale in the same way I view some cat from Istanbul. I don't have any more or any less love for one person than the other.”

“Yeah. Because you can. Which means you're allowed to. You therefore have no functional loyalty. And don't give me any of that
loyalty to the truth
crap. The key word is
functional
. You and people like you are living in a dream. You just can't imagine the fact that you have enemies in the world. Well, you've got them, bud, a lot of them. This place is so safe you can pretend you're at a cultural smorgasbord.”

“I feel you, Uncle. Only I'm not pretending. Good or bad, this is my inheritance. I really am honest to God this way. And so are a million others of my generation. We don't hate anyone. We're detestable,” I say, “but we aren't stupid.”

The light wind around us fails to muffle the heavy whistle of our breathing. My uncle looks up at the northwest entrance, then over at me. “Says who?”

Just then I see a ripple in the water, oxygen tickling the surface, and whisper, “Hey, Uncle, sshhh, I think we got one,” but he's up and gone, heading back to his empty estate at the prospect I offer of no prospects, his bottle of mystery liquor swinging and spilling over his hand, blind to the four-hundred-dollar pole pulled splashing into the clear water of the fake lake by a real bite, our first and last, dragged down and out into the deep by a fake fish we'll never catch to kill and fry—or even handle to release and save.

AT WORK
I have nothing to do today but take a dozen defunct roller chairs and three scarred coffee tables to a Goodwill in Sunnyvale (“Get a receipt!” shouts Chinaski) and then unscrew a few file cabinets from the wall in the old San Carlos office. I finish up before noon, bypass Chinaski, and call the big boss man.

“Take the rest of the day off.”

He sounds buzzed already through the static of the phone. “Uncle, I can help with something else.”

“Nothing else for you, nephew. Go rest your back.”

At the guesthouse, Tali has left the message
CALL ME
on a note under the door. Before I even walk toward the kitchen counter, the phone rings. I know who it is. Almost don't answer because of this knowledge, but anything to break up my weekday evenings.

I pick up the phone and hear: “Get dressed, little brother.”

“For what?”

“Job interview.”

“Got a job, remember? Two weeks ago you harassed our uncle into giving me one.”

“Listen. You have too much time off. This job would be on weekends and a few days during the week.”

“Do you ever ask questions, sister?”

“Look. I had to make some calls just to get the interview today. You've got to be there at three.”

I almost ask, How'd you know I had a half-day? but I know the answer. Who wants to be reminded that a relation is checking up with your employer, another relation, like a probation officer?

“They're located at 137 Tully. Cross-street Capitol.”

“That's East San Jo.”

“Right.”

I catch the bus out without incident. That's rather nice. Just for fun, or for torture, I count thirteen Starbucks on the way over, big ones, baby ones, all with customers spilling out the door. So much for strength in diversity. From the stop, it's a short walk. One block down and I'll be there. I pass another Starbucks hidden by the draping branches of some white-barked birch trees and decide in the shade of the cool elms along the street that it's best not to think about the world, about myself, about myself in connection to the world.

Hell, I just walk on, whistle it out, hum “Nowhere Man” by the Beatles, then a bluegrass jam I'd picked up called, “I Am the Man of Constant Sorrow,” another tune entitled, “Thanks a Lot,” by some Pacific Northwest country chick named Neko Case, play some soccer with an acorn from a wide-bodied oak whose apogee branch reaches clear across the street, fire a long-range shot into the leaf-and litter-strewn gutter (“Goooooooooooooooooaaaaaalllllllllllllll!”), and lift my arms into the chill air, eyes on the brown tinted windows of the commercial buildings. According to the addresses on the map, the people I'm seeking for help are in the offices of the Silicon Valley Chapter of the National Organization of Women.

I make my way over, spot the NOW unit and its mongrel American flag of rainbow stripes and a peace sign superimposed over the fifty stars outside the door, enter.

Immediately, I get slapped with a greeting: “We're not interested.”

She's a thin-necked teal-eyed Nordic, teeth aligned like the rings dangling from her nose. I got the feeling that if she grew her prickly red flattop out to bob length, removed the fake African accouterments, and smiled, her world would turn upside down, and we could talk civilly. Maybe even flirtatiously.

Yeah, right.

“Can I help you?”

“Oh,” I say.

“Oh?”

“Um, I guess I have—”

“Wait,” she says. “Are you Paul Tusifale?”

I nod, hoping for the best, preparing for the worst.

“We've been waiting for you,” she says.

“And you would be ... ?”

“Follow me,” she says.

I'm led past partitioned cubicles enveloping all kinds of busy ladies, one in brown hip-hugging cords, bare feet in Birkenstocks; another in a sleek business suit, her hair pulled back tight against the cranium. I try to keep my head up as I walk, to appear if not manly at least kingly, the despised despot. Cortez among the Incas, Mobutu and his Zaireans, Kamehameha with his Hawaiians. I have no clue how to hold my shoulders in here. It's strange: This is supposed to be the place where I feel the most vital, the most alive, where I possess something that the hostesses viscerally desire.

Ashamed to say it: I fear the gender zealotry surrounding me. I can feel my testes crawl into the most remote region of their shrinking sack, trying to defy gravity, avoid the void. Remain—if not potent—of use. I fear the clarity of the chirping women in this office,
frothing with angry, almost masculine energy. I'm zoning out, thinking of little Toby and his future under the whip, how he'll never get out of the starting gate or even appreciate the metaphor.

“In there,” she says, pointing to an office on a platform beyond the cubicles.

“And you would be?” I say again, but she walks off.

Except for a desk with a framed photo, a few magazines, and an overhead television, the office is empty. I don't dare look at the photo, but I do it anyway, feeling my courage returning amid the natives, standing, turning the collage toward me: it's a pantheon of feminism. On the left, a black-and-white of Gloria Steinem circa mid-eighties, looking, I must say, coital, fertile, and yet hostile; in the middle, a Catholic print of Joan of Arc at the stake; on the right, Oprah Winfrey, doctored up, slightly plump in green tweed. Three magazines: a
New Yorker
from the last century, a
Vogue
with Drew Barrymore on the cover, a lit mag called
PMS: Poem, Memoir, Story
, published, I see, by the coed University of Alabama.

There's a newspaper at my feet, but I decide to angle my chair toward the maze of cubicles behind me. I want to watch the women walk about on their toes. They are strong, wide-shouldered, agile. These are the breeders of yesteryear, sought after by all the bigwigs with dough back in the day. Maybe our race isn't so bad off with these women at the helm. Maybe one of these lovely creatures will row her boat out to this manhole in distress. How much worse can they do than the opposition from the other side of the aisle? I don't know. But I do know they can't do it all, just like the opposition from the other side of the aisle.

I pick up the
Merc
, at least to remove myself from eye-humping my hostesses, and grasp the header on the front page:
Three Bum-Beaters Charged with First-Degree Murder
.

There they are, the latest carbuncular-faced, testosterone-laden
Grand Theft Auto
-playing, white boy misfit teens of clean middle-class
suburban backgrounds, terrified, bug-eyed, not quite getting what they've done to make everyone mad but on the undeniable verge of learning the concept of legal repercussions, the darkness of moral aftermath, the reality of hard time and
this is the price you pay for the life you choose
, yet even so still sitting in some virtual pocket of cyberspace they've become more than accustomed to creating, awaiting some benign button in the sky to appear so they may reset the game, having faith that they'll be all right, faith that the homeless Mexican transient they stomped into oblivion did not die or, à la Lazarus, will come back to life, as he always does on the Playstation screen, their thumbs and index fingers the fittest part of their flaccid bodies.

Oh, the places you'll see
.

Marko Franzen, Mike Rude, and Thomas McMalley, lost children on the sea of virtual reality.

All three
enfants perdus
are being charged as adults, fifteen-year-old murderers in the first degree. Bastard fate: you couldn't have gut-shot a weaker target than Marko Franzen's frail mother. A part-time nanny, helpless, shocked, Mrs. Nineveh Franzen ain't gonna get through it, I know it. She's gonna break down like a jalopy in an Indy 500. Gonna get driven off the course, slammed into the wall, explode in flames: ulcers, heartbreak, insomnia.

I hate to sound callous but Jesus, Nineveh, you're on the front page of a national newspaper with a breathing apparatus stuck to your face, and your pleading eyes remind me of that crankster in the park in life-or-death need of his five-buck fix. You gotta fight it, Ninny, don't let them get you down. It's only going to steamroll from here on out. But she's quoted as saying, “My poor boy doesn't have a single hair on his chin.”

I read the article, don't have a clue why. After the chumps at Columbine and the chimp at Virginia Tech and the five dozen hatchet jobs in between, we just get deeper and deeper entrenched in the
futility of this country, this people. Everytime a Boy Scout walks a handicapped lady across the street, a gothic geek in black shoe polish has cut up three girls at the other end of the neighborhood: some lame-ass in bifocals who grew up on slick inartistic bloodbaths like
Reservoir Dogs
and
Kill Bill
and
Natural Born Killers
. The mental chains of what's
just a flick, young man, just a film
have been broken, and he's now physically on the loose. Enacting mimicry. Not a single book in his repertoire to counterbalance the sensationalism, no poem to beautify this life. The Boy Scout's got no chance. He's gotta escort a million cripples to erase the effect of his nasty counterparts, do it until he himself is nearly crippled, blind, dead.