Apex Hides the Hurt (10 page)

The waitress led him toward the back, then suddenly altered course halfway into the room, dropping the menus on a table for two by the window overlooking the river. At first he blamed his limp, and the waitress’s desire to minimize her exposure to his infirmity. Then he recognized the make of the table—it was a Footsie, familiar to him from when the name won an Identity Award a few years ago—and he realized she was trying to help the mayor out by hooking her up with a romantic spot.

He took in the evening traffic while he waited. During his walks around town, he’d limited his patrol to the square, never venturing down the promenade. True, the rain had hampered his investigation of the area, but it was a fact that he was not a very curious man. Riverboat Charlie’s was off the main drag, however, giving him a good look at the small pier. It was the first cloudless night of his stay, and people were out enjoying the fine weather. In all likelihood, the building at the foot of the pier had been a warehouse at some point, used by Winthrop to ship his barbed wire out of town, but it had been cut up into tiny shops since. Video store and trinket store and a bicycle shop. At one point it had served a single purpose, served its master. Sure, back in the day, you controlled something like that dock and you called the shots.

Regina materialized across from him before he knew it, preventing any momentary dithering over the right greeting. Hug, cheek peck, or handshake. She was more relaxed this time around, wearing a low-cut blouse that was more daring than he’d given her credit for. “Glad I called ahead,” she said.

In only a few minutes, the place had almost filled up. He recognized a good number of the other diners from the hotel. Riverboat Charlie’s was probably listed as an approved restaurant in the Help Tour Information Packet, after a list of where to change currency in this strange land and the number of the nearest embassy. “It’s never this packed,” she added, “unless it’s someone’s birthday or a holiday or Valentine’s Day.”

“This is the big weekend.”

“They get bigger every year,” she said, cocking her head dismissively. “I hadn’t thought of the timing when we talked about bringing you here, but I’m sure Lucky had it all planned out.”

“He puts on a good show.”

The waitress parked a thigh against the Footsie, and she and Regina caught up briefly before she took their drink order. He couldn’t tell if Regina was a regular, or if this was standard mayoral interaction. The waitress gave him a snaggletoothed smile before scampering to the kitchen counter.

“Back where I’m from,” he said, “if you’re a local celebrity, they tape your 8 X 10 picture over the cash register.”

Regina gave him a wry look, then gave in. “I don’t know about celebrity, but I am a strange creature around here, I’ll give you that. First black mayor since we started having mayors in this town. Descended from the first families. Oh, I left for a time,” she said, shifting gears, as if afraid he’d think her a hick. “For a good many years. Went away to college. Got married. Got divorced. But I came back. Which puts me in with Lucky. We tried other places, but we chose to come back home. Which means something to people in a town like this.”

She asked him about his meeting with Albie, which turned into a long discussion over whether or not Albie was mentally disturbed. Regina was more forgiving of eccentricity than he was. A mom and dad steered their two young children toward a booth in the back, the father offering a throaty, “Hel-lo, Regina,” as he passed. The man took quick measure of him, then winked at her. The two kids bounded into the booth with gusto and started flapping their menus in the air.

All this winking and weird glances. She must be kinda hard up, he thought. He wondered if this was the type of place where everybody was related. Where everyone was some degree of cousin. Did that family come from hearty founder stock, were they Goodes or Fields or another, less famous First Family? Or did they move here recently, to work for Lucky or other new computer businesses?

Regina stirred her wine spritzer distractedly. “They think we’re on a date,” she said. “It doesn’t happen that often.” She chuckled. “My ex-husband came to town once. Nobody knew who he was. They thought we were having a romantic outing. Mayor Goode and her new beau. We laughed. Enough time had passed that we could laugh together again.” Her shoulders relaxed. “He was a bit of an asshole, to tell you the truth,” she added in a rush, and he could see she was momentarily embarrassed by the vulgarity.

He smiled. Maybe not hard up. Just dosed with Isolatrum in the same amount as everyone else. The government was putting it in the drinking water these days along with fluoride.

She said, “People look at me and they see what they want to see. Black people see me as family, because my name goes way back. The white people know what the Goode name means in this community—tradition, like Winthrop means tradition. And the new people know that I agree with a lot of what Lucky is trying to do and that he and I have been a team, in terms of trying to bring this place into the twenty-first century. Way I figure, I’m a bit of a triple threat that way.” She halted, considering the full implications of what she was saying. “Of course,” she continued, “after my vote in the meeting, people don’t know what to do with me.”

Sure, sure. He said, “At some point you were going to vote with Lucky, right? Then you just blindsided him. What changed your mind?”

She started to speak, then stopped. By the fish tank, a table filled with Help Tourists hit a raucous patch and distracted him. This Nordic guy stabbed the air with his fork for emphasis. She said simply, “I’ll be right back,” and disappeared to the restrooms. B for Buccaneer, L for Lass.

The cook slapped a bell, and placed two dishes on the ledge that opened onto the dining room. He had a happy idea that it was their food. He looked hopefully at the waitress but she refused to notice that their order was up. She stood by the hostess station, squaring the corners of a stack of menus. Minutes passed.

What do you call that terrible length of time between when you see that your food is ready and when your waitress drags her ass over to your table with it? He saw Regina emerge from the back of the restaurant. His eyes zipped to the plates sitting on the kitchen ledge. Tantalasia. Rather broad applications, Tantalasia, apart from the food thing. An emotional state, that muted area between desire and consummation. A literal territory, some patch of unnamed broken gravel between places on a map. A keeper, he told himself. Did that mean he was keeping keepers again? Names for rainy days?

She dropped her napkin in her lap and spoke rapidly. “Can you argue with Lucky, really? Can you argue with prosperity? Can you protest change? It’s jobs, money for the town, money for the ‘infrastructure.’ We didn’t have an infrastructure until Lucky came back. We had ‘stuff that needed fixing.’ How can you fight a word like
infrastructure
?”

Regina scanned the room to check for eavesdroppers. “You fight it by saying: No. Look at the dock across the street. Winthrop comes to town, he has the resources to build that thing. Most important, he’s white. What are Goode and Field going to say? They didn’t have a choice, did they? Back then. What could they do? They lose this land, this land is what they are at that point. They lose that, they lose themselves. He’s not threatening them, Winthrop. But he wouldn’t have to say it. They did what they had to do. Give up their name for their lives—was that a little thing or a big thing after all they’d been through?” Her chest heaved but her eyes stared defiantly. “Well, I have a choice. And I choose the truth.”

The waitress dropped their plates on the table. Regina took a bite, winced at the temperature. She put her fork down. She said, “Sometimes when I have a hard day and I’m too tired to leave the office and I just want to put my head on my desk, I think about how they got here. In their wagons, all that way from the plantations that had been their homes. Think about that: those places were their homes. Places of degradation and death. So I get my ass out of my office because I have a house that is my own and that’s what they fought for, why they came all this way. They didn’t know where they were headed when they started or that they’d end up here, all they knew was what they had: Freedom. Which was a kind of home that they carried inside them, if you think about it. When they finally arrived here and looked around, what was the word that came to their lips? What was the only thing they can think of when they see this place they have chosen? The word on their lips?”

For the life of him he didn’t know if this was a rhetorical question or if she really needed him to say it. Say the word for her to hear. Also Tantalasia: the in-between place where you’re not sure if you should say something, if it is truly as important as it appears to be that you say something, the right words.

Living in Tantalasia. Neither Winthrop nor New Prospera. Nor Freedom. It occurred to him that in its current suspended state, the town was effectively nameless.

.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .

Assuming you had a facility for choosing the right name, the just name, for healing the disquiet of anonymity through the application of a balming name, you were a nomenclature consultant. He was a natural, they said. During his time in Winthrop, his mind kept returning to one of his early assignments with the firm. It came back to him whenever he tried to sleep.

Statistically speaking, a good part of the Western world has played with Ehko. It was one of the most popular toys in the world. The plastic pieces came in different interlocking shapes, the same four or five hues. Once you learned how to hook the pieces together with that little snap sound, you yourself were hooked for a good stretch of childhood. The tiny bricks were easily misplaced, but the kits came with extras and the prodigal pieces returned eventually, coaxed by brooms, even if it took years.

On the sides of the boxes were pictures of things you could make out of Ehko bricks if you followed the example, and for a while the kids followed the example. Then they found out that the fun part was making their own bizarre creations. Deviating from the blueprints. The toy was plastic and so was its meaning. He figured there was some mathematical way of determining the exact number of permutations, but the overall impression was that there was no end to what you can make out of Ehko. Parents who played with Ehko as children bought the kits for their own children, and Ehko was passed down alongside morals and prejudices and genetic predisposition to certain illnesses.

The march of time. Over the years, Ehko International started stamping out more extravagant sets, like Ehko Stock Car Racing Track and Ehko Metro Hospital. Again, the kids could follow the plans and make a sterling HMO, or stray and come up with their own, more realistic concoctions, like a hospital without a waiting room, or one equipped with a particularly large morgue. The bricks as the very components of imagination. Every year the company unleashed another dozen sets, each new batch more baroque and complicated than the last: Ehko Andromeda Space Station, Ehko Lost City of Atlantis. Made wistful by the cumbersome boxes they hoisted from the toy store, parents wrote to Ehko International inquiring about the simple kits of their youth. One such favorite was Ehko Village.

Ehko Village had been quite popular during the fifties and early sixties. The Town Hall, the Fire Station, the Church, easily replicable from diagrams, addressed innate notions. Something about this country. But alas the counterculture, the political tumult, the odd riot put a kibosh on sales. Times had changed, but the letters from the now grown-up architects of Ehko Village told the corporation that maybe an update was in order. Being Swiss, they had a very reliable system of dealing with customer feedback. Sentiment rattled its cage. Maybe, they thought, the same concept would fly again, if reworked a bit. But they definitely needed a new name.

He met the Ehko team in the conference room and they outlined their plans, these Swiss people. They were a flock of blond birds, misled by the wind to a city where the going rate was mongrel pigeon. He pretended to listen but the whole time he had his eyes on the box containing the new Village. Once they were done talking he told them to ask the receptionist for some tickets to a Broadway show, if they were so inclined. Strip club passes if they weren’t. He had his own evening already mapped out.

He took the kit home. How could he resist? The pieces fell in a clatter when he overturned the box onto his living-room floor. The proposed town as pictured on the box was an unassuming thing, compared to what the company had been churning out lately. It was out of step with the rest of the product family and out of step with the spirit of the times. It was no Ehko Boomtown Gone Bust or Ehko Ghetto. The machines, he noted, had not been configured to stamp out the little studded bricks of Ehko Abraham Lincoln Public Housing or Ehko Methadone Clinic. (He enjoyed himself more back then.) In the pictures on the box, there were no shadows in the alleys, for there were no alleys. Everything fit together snugly, and there was no place where an unruly element might find purchase.

Some things were different, he observed, but the steps they had taken to modernize the Village pointed more toward demographic reality than slippery, more elusive concepts. The citizens of Ehko worlds were bulbous moppets with painted smiles; as they did in all their sets these days, Ehko included brown bulbs (that were not too brown) and yellow bulbs (that corresponded to some hypothetical Asian skin pigment) according to ratios informed by sales research. This new Village was integrated. And should a child desire to place a fireman’s helmet on a female Ehkotian, it would fit. No longer would pesky perms forbid entrance to the gates of equal opportunity. The shops came in wider variety, and now children could snap an ice-cream shop together or a drugstore. The bricks had not changed, however. Red white and blue bricks still waited patiently for little fingers to quicken them.

His legs remembered the correct position for squatting down with toys. He played. He fit the round male studs into the round female grooves. He got some thinking done as he hunkered down on his fallen-asleep legs. As he cycled through an array of recombinations, his subversive attempts at city planning, the strangest things occurred to him. Sinister and malformed architecture emerged from the pile, ruins slowly revealed by shifting dunes. He could make out the police station in the rubble. If he left it there, in fragments, would there be no crime? By constructing some sort of fascistic multiplex out of the movie theater bricks, it would, according to his logic, call into creation a new cinema, one appropriate to such a venue, but what sort of films would they be? By leaving out the hospital would the citizens not die? Like the plastic of their flesh and the four letters of the name imprinted on every brick, the citizens would live forever. He could leave out the streets and jam the buildings together into a horror of overcrowding, where no one ever went outside into the poisoned atmosphere, but remained behind the walls of Ehko Dystopolis.