Apex Hides the Hurt (16 page)

Dreaming Is a Cinch When You Stop to Smell the Flowers. Dreaming Is a Cinch When You Crush All Enemies. Dreaming Is a Cinch When You Bathe in the Arterial Spray of the Vanquished.

He was surrounded by extras sipping tequila drinks, bit players in an infomercial for a lifestyle. All this can be yours for the low introductory price of . . . Were they aware of this? Did it matter? They were used to commercials, commercials were a natural feature of existence, like rain or dawn. Winthrop the Elder had forced his vision onto this land and his people, and Lucky was no different. Sure their methods were different. But their motives, goals, the results—timeless medicine-show shenanigans. Were the smoke and mirrors even necessary, he wondered? New Prospera strutted on the quicksilver feet of futurity. It was progress, and progress was Windex, Vaseline, Band-Aids: pure brand superiority. Beyond advertising. Why advertise when the name of your product was tattooed on hearts and brains, had always been there, a part of us, under the skin.

“Peep This” swaggered from the jukebox, and people shrieked as they recognized the opening sample. Every couple of years a hip-hop song invaded the culture with such holy fervor that it revealed itself to be a passkey to universal psyche, perfectly naming some national characteristic or diagnosing some common spiritual ailment. You heard the song every damned place, in the hippest underground grottoes and at the squarest weddings, and no one remained seated. “Peep This” possessed exactly such uncanny powers, and in the way of such things completely killed off a few choice slang words through overexposure. When grannies peeped this or peeped that from the windows of their retirement-community aeries, it was time for the neologists to return to their laboratories.

Just a few bars into “Peep This” and leis were bouncing off the ceiling. That sublime and imperative bass line, he told himself. Behinds jostled tables and chairs to make more dancing room. Beverley pulled him up. He did not beg off or point dejectedly at his bum leg. Truth be told, like everyone else, he loved “Peep This.” It had taken months of brief exposure at the corner bodega before he realized that the song had attached itself to his nervous system. He was more or less powerless against it, a blinking automaton. In the Border Café, he swayed and nodded to the directives of the bass line, nothing too extravagant, but he was, nonetheless, dancing.

New Prospera. New beginnings, blank slates. For all who came here. Including him. No, he was not about to hock all his possessions and hightail it out west, but things would not be the same when he got back home. The old ways would not hold. Would he go back to work, reclaim the mug and office that was rightfully his? His thoughts alighted on his cuff links. When was the last time he had seen them? Where the fuck were they? He looked around at his new cohorts, into their sweaty, peppy faces. The name was what they needed. Narcotic. Hypnotizing. New Prospera was the tune people knew the second they heard it, the music they had danced to all their lives. That was the point of a name in this situation: to set up a vibration in the bones that resembled home.

He snapped his fingers in time to the famous bridge of “Peep This,” that dangerous territory that often compelled the weakest dancers in the room to unfortunate excess, but this bunch did not take the bait. Which made this a bona fide miracle in process. He pictured “Peep This” as the soundtrack for an Apex ad, wherein one by one his current co-partiers pulled back their sleeves or pants legs to reveal perfectly camouflaged wounds. Slightly roughed up by life’s little accidents but somehow better for the experience. He bebopped his head to the beat. Was he supposed to honor the old ways because they were tried and true? Fuck all Winthrops, and let their spotted hands twist on their chests in agony. And forget the lovers of Freedom. Was he supposed to right historical wrongs? He was a consultant, for Christ’s sake. He had no special powers.

He snickered, mulling over what Goode and Field would do in this situation. The Light and the Dark. Goode announces in preacherly tones, “We are Americans and the bounty of American promise is our due. It is what we worked for, it is what we died for, and we call it New Prospera.” The audience moving their heads in solemn amen and hope. To that sweet music.

He pictured Field, but the vision was dimmer. He saw a lone figure, withdrawing into shadow after delivering a grim, pithy “Where you sit is where you stand.” And really, what the hell were people supposed to extract from that?

The song ended. The librarian tickled him under his ribs and beat it to the bar for refills. Jim Lee appeared, mopping his brow with his T-shirt. There were only a few sips left in his glass—another hour had passed. Jim said, “What do you think?” which in retrospect could have meant any number of things, but in that moment was interpreted as the latest inquiry into the town’s name status. And this time he had an answer.

The jukebox was quiet, and he seized the opening, shouting, “I have an announcement to make! I have an announcement to make!” Everybody turned. Jack Cameron excavated a drunken bellow from deep in his stomach. Leis slapped his face, hurled from all points. An inexplicable brassiere zipped by.

So encouraging. These people understood him. He would deliver his ruling and be done with it. His ticket back home. “Okay, okay! People have been asking me all night if I have come to a decision. About the whole name thing. Well, I have.” He put a hand on Jim Lee’s shoulder and climbed onto a chair. He looked out into the room. He cleared his throat. Steadied himself. He met Beverley’s gaze and smiled foolishly. Certainly the table was stable enough, and would heighten the drama. So he used bony Jim Lee as a cane, and clambered up on the table. Someone threw a lei up at him and he caught it. He held it in the air and they hollered, one or two among them flicking their Bics and holding them up in tribute.

To be done with his stupid exile. Why had he removed himself so completely from those things that others cherished, with his needless complications and equivocations. It was all very simple, after all. Why did he need to make it so difficult all the time. So dark in outlook all the time, frankly. And he felt like being frank, above the fray as he was, astride the tabletop, on the layer of polyurethane covering the map of Cozumel.

It was a nice moment. Someone should have taken a picture. Nice composition, what with the multicolored streamers crisscrossing the ceiling and his triumphant manic face. If only someone had taken a picture.

He was about to speak when something in him gave way, and his bad leg jackknifed with such speed that he was on the floor in an ugly mess before anyone could catch him. In the ensuing hubbub, he fixated on one exchange in particular:

“What happened?”

“He slipped.”

.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .

He was weak and feverish. Caught in the fangs of the big fear, shaken back and forth. His brain worked as unsteadily as his feet, had wires hanging out after someone ripped out that important piece of hardware. It was cooler outside, much cooler than inside the banquet hall, and this soothed him for a few blocks. The streetlights and traffic lights and neon lights all had halos, and seemed beacons summoning him. But so many different directions: How was he to know which way to go?

He was aware of his body as a shell. Fragile, thin as excuses. A vessel containing the dust of his essential him-ness, which would be lost when the vessel failed. Well, that was the way of the world. For a time he was fixed in his body, stuck and named and fixed in place, but one day that would not be the case. One day only his name would remain, on a tombstone or etched onto an urn, marking his dried bones or ashes. A delivery truck almost clocked him as he stumbled into the crosswalk. Pay attention, he told himself. Pay attention: accidents come out of nowhere to teach you a lesson. He should be looking out for that which strikes from above, things like lightning that fall from the sky to instruct through violence.

Blubbering in his fever. On the buildings the names hung there as if by magic. (The billboards were attached by bolts and brackets.) In the windows of stores they were spread out in an unruly mess, this pure chaos, sick madness, as if tossed into a garbage heap. (Items were arrayed in orderly, enticing displays.) And the citizens walked the streets, alone, in comfortable pairs, in ragged groups, with their true names blazing over their hearts, without pride or shame, plainly, for this new arrangement was just and true. (Strangers passed him, and he passed strangers.)

Now he was in the Crossroads of the World, as this place had come to be called. The names here were magnificent, gigantic, powered by a million volts and blinking in malevolent dynamism. Off the chart. The most powerful names of all lived here and it was all he could do to stare. He had entered the Apex.

What was all this struggle? He answered himself: There was not enough room to be heard and understood. Every name competed against every other name for attention. (He could not bring himself to call the reward of this competition by its true name, love.) To be heard—because if it was not heard how could it be said to exist? People were always saying, “You have to get your name out there,” and in that moment for the life of him he could not understand what those words might mean. We spent our lives trying to keep our true names inside and hidden, because if they were let out we would be known and ruined.

In front of a newsstand, looking up at the sky as if it were a vast eternal mirror, he saw all the logos and names, and saw himself as some brand of mite lost in the pages of the musty encyclopedia of the world. Galanta and Apex, Percept and Rigitol. If he severed the golden tethers that kept these things close to this mortal world, to their mortal meanings, imprisoned as
products
, these names were the names of heroes who had performed miraculous feats. These names were the names of ancient cities where great battles had been won, where the words
culture
and
civilization
had first been formed by human mouths. But we reeled them in and kept them close to this muddy earth, and on the shelves of supermarkets they were artificial kneecap lubricants, sponges equipped with abrasive undersides, aerosol sprays that magically banished static cling. Such disreputable gods.

Isn’t it great when you’re a kid and the whole world is full of anonymous things? He coughed into his sleeve. Everything is bright and mysterious until you know what it is called and then all the light goes out of it. All those flying gliding things are just
birds
. And etc. Once we knew the name of it, how could we ever come to love it? He told himself: What he had given to all those things had been the right name, but never the true name. For things had true natures, and they hid behind false names, beneath the skin we gave them.

Constellations wheeled around him, lit up under the auspices of the electric company. He stood beneath them in this mess, limping around the valley of the names. Star watchers were fucked. There were too many stars in the sky to name them all. They were bright and keen, but had to make do with letters and numbers—B317, N467, T675—until they earned their names.

Until then, anonymous and barely there at all.

A name that got to the heart of the thing—that would be miraculous. But he never got to the heart of the thing, he just slapped a bandage on it to keep the pus in. What is the word, he asked himself, for that elusive thing? It was on the tip of his tongue. What is the name for that which is always beyond our grasp? What do you call
that which escapes
?

If he closed his eyes and fell back, would someone catch him? He decided to try it.

THREE

HE IMAGINED
a town called A. Around the communal fire they’re shaping arrowheads and carving tributes to the god of the hunt. One day some guys with spears come over the ridge, perform all kinds of meanness, take over, and the new guys rename the town B. Whereupon they hang around the communal fire shaping arrowheads and carving tributes to the god of the hunt. Some climatic tragedy occurs—not carving the correct tributary figurines probably—and the people of B move farther south, where word is there’s good fishing, at least according to those who wander to B just before being cooked for dinner. Another tribe of unlucky souls stops for the night in the emptied village, looks around at the natural defenses provided by the landscape, and decides to stay awhile. It’s a whole lot better than their last digs—what with the lack of roving tigers and such—plus it comes with all the original fixtures. They call the place C, after their elder, who has learned that pretending to talk to spirits is a fun gag that gets you stuff. Time passes. More invasions, more recaptures, D, E, F, and G. H stands as it is for a while. That ridge provides some protection from the spring floods, and if you keep a sentry up there you can see the enemy coming for miles. Who wouldn’t want to park themselves in that real estate? The citizens of H leave behind cool totems eventually toppled by the people of I, whose lack of aesthetic sense is made up for by military acumen. J, K, L, adventures in thatched roofing, some guys with funny religions from the eastern plains, long-haired freaks from colder climes, the town is burned to the ground and rebuilt by still more fugitives. This is the march of history. And conquest and false hope. M falls to plague, N to natural disaster—the same climatic tragedy as before, apparently it’s cyclical. Mineral wealth makes it happen for the O people, and the P people are renowned for their basket weaving. No one ever—
ever
—mentions Q. The dictator names the city after himself; his name starts with the letter R. When the socialists come to power they spend a lot of time painting over his face, which is everywhere. They don’t last. Nobody lasts because there’s always somebody else. They all thought they owned it because they named it and that was their undoing. They should have kept the place nameless. They should have been glad for their good fortune, and left it at that. X, Y, Z.

.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .

The Help Tourists stood over him, stunned, pebble eyes blinking, before they helped him up. There they were, getting their freak on, and then something like that happens. New Fast-Acting Buzzkillzz—When Everyone’s Having Too Much Fun. He assured them that he was okay but maybe it was time to go. Poor Beverley insisted on her aid. He did not need physical assistance, but nonetheless. They staggered down the street and she attempted to draw him out with two jokes. He didn’t get either one and unsuccessfully feigned comprehension. His palms were smeared with a mixture of grit and spilled margaritas, a shameful mud.

At the door of the hotel, he gave quick thanks, abandoning her on the curb despite the obvious fact that she would have assisted him to his room and afterward. The night had not turned out as planned for all involved.

There was one more indignity in store for him.

His room was clean.

The clothes folded and tucked into drawers, the flecked cups in the bathroom banished and replaced by cellophane-covered cousins, the paltry lozenges of soap replenished. A lemon zesty tendril tickled his nose. The only mark of disorder was the
DO NOT DISTURB
sign, which had been rent evenly in two and placed in the middle of the quilt. The housekeeper had placed it just so, the pieces touching at a forty-five-degree angle and elegantly framed by the edges of the bed. A tableau of victory. She had been a worthy opponent, and he lamented this second defeat, so quickly after the last one. Reminded of his misfortune after blissful forgetfulness for a few days, and then bested by a feather duster: it had been a brutal twenty minutes.

He showered, inspecting his body for bruises and marks. Nothing to the eye. Except for the site of his most famous injury.

He fell asleep quickly but it didn’t last. An hour later he was staring at the ceiling and he knew he was going to have a hard time for a couple of hours. Cleaned up, straightened up according to the house style, his room was returned to its familiar strangeness, and he remembered his first night in the hotel. Back where and when he started. How had he ended up in this place? Not this particular room, but
place
. No one to call. No one to ask for advice, or even calming nonsense about the events of their day. Sure, he could point to his hospitalization as a clear marker of Before and After, but he recognized such distinctions as counterfeit. His course had been set long in advance. This place was the sum of old choices, the heap of his years. In that nameless town, he asked himself, what was he going by lately? What name was he traveling under? Perhaps his banishment to this place was only fitting. Unavoidable.

His guts twisted on themselves and he uttered a startled groan, cursing the barbecue and all it had wrought. Intestinal turmoil and insomnia were his buddies until dawn, when he finally fell back to sleep.

Everybody was gone by noon. He heard the luggage catch on the lip of the elevator, the groups huddle below his window as they waited for the correct shuttle bus. They made farewells and traded personal information, some sincerely and some for politeness’ sake, and he was struck by the momentum of endings. Then it seemed only he was left in the hotel, floating in his bed three stories above the town, a patch of bad weather hovering over things. A brand of darkness that set people who saw it waiting for lightning and noise.

Things had been reset. Over days he had re-created the chaos of his rooms back home, and it had been undone. Last night he had been on the verge of delivering a name, and had been silenced. By a wobbly table, his stupid foot, a momentary lapse of balance: it didn’t matter. He had been returned to the day of his arrival. In his new room, he started from scratch. The housekeeper had made a gift of a neat pile of books in the center of the desk. He reached for Gertrude Sanders’s contributions to the world of letters, the official version and one less so. He hit the books.

.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .

Colored.

The sliver of himself still in tune with marketing shivered each time Gertrude used the word
colored
. He kept stubbing his toe on it. As it were. Colored, Negro, Afro-American, African American. She was a few iterations behind the times. Not that you could keep up, anyway. Every couple of years someone came up with something that got us an inch closer to the truth. Bit by bit we crept along. As if that thing we believed to be approaching actually existed.

It was her use of the word that got him thinking about it. You call something by a name, you fix it in place. A thing or a person, it didn’t matter—the name you gave it allowed you to draw a bead, take aim, shoot. But there was a flip side of calling something by the name you gave it—and that was wanting to be called by the name that you gave to yourself. What is the name that will give me the dignity and respect that is my right? The key that will unlock the world.

Before colored, slave. Before slave, free. And always somewhere, nigger.

What was next? In the great procession. Because things never remain still for long. What will we call ourselves next, he wondered. If he knew what was next, he’d know who he would be.

.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .

People started stopping him on the street. When he went out for coffee. When he went out for lunch, his research material in a white plastic bag dragging down his arm, dead weight. It began with double takes as he stalked Winthrop Square. They’d gesture at him and whisper to each other, That’s him. They approached, fingers on his shoulder. You’re that guy, aren’t you? I know you. Didn’t I see your picture in the paper? Lemme tell you something.

He had considered his three clients, one after the other, and listened to their arguments and entreaties. But in truth they were only three of a thousand clients. Thousands. He was quarry now, out in the open, exposed. If they had an opening, they took it, blocking his path or looming over him as he sat guzzling his coffee. The former bookkeeper for the factory, whose posture was such that he appeared to grow into himself. Teenagers on skateboards who scraped across the pavement halted two inches from his face, and cackled excitedly before jetting off. Widows and veterans with their disparate agendas. Homemakers laden with shopping. The old white man he had met the first day, the one with the dog, intercepted him and laid this spiel on him while the animal gnawed on his shoelaces.

He said, Okay, okay.

In the middle of the afternoon he sat on a bench in the square. Was he daring them to approach him, did he want them to? Did he need something from them? He didn’t know. When he caught people across the street squinting at him, he filled in their backstories. That one descended from the second wave of newcomers, the ones who showed up in Winthrop when the plant had taken off and was expanding. That lady over there claimed a direct blood tie to those who followed in Goode and Field’s wake once word of Freedom spread, once people heard of the place where colored folk could be treated like human beings. Advertising of one sort or another had drawn them here, slogans with their luminous entreaties. Freedom was a place where you could get a fresh start. Winthrop, now there’s a place where a man can make his mark. The future is yours. Odds were, if his stories didn’t fit the person in question, they were right for somebody else. That white guy right there had only been here for a month, he tapped out code for Aberdeen and was raising his kid by himself, an easier proposition here than in the city he had left. New Prospera was the final element; after that his resurrection would be complete.

They wanted to know what he thought about things. By the end of the afternoon they were beginning to scare him. Better to be back home on the thirtieth floor of a midtown office building than down here in muck, elbow to elbow with these specimens. Giving him the Muttonchop treatment. At lunch he was granted a monstrous vision as the waitress quizzed him, her pen poised over her notebook. Him as the last living being and the rest of humanity turned to zombies. Like in the horror movies. As was custom for such situations, no reason was given for this transformation. Why is everyone so alien? Just because. He runs through the streets of a deserted town, newspapers twisting in the wind, dumbfounded headlines ripping down the ave. They come at him, lurching, wearing the same clothes they used to wear, normal-looking yet in complete exile from themselves and their histories. Surrounding him, after pieces of him. Hey, mister—what’s your name?

The waitress told him New Prospera had a nice ring to it. They approached him and asked questions, as if he could help them. As if they could be helped.

He made some headway. At one point he took a break and found himself by the window of his hotel room. Not looking at any single thing but feeling as if he were peering through the surface of Winthrop Square. To whatever was below. Just spacing out, really, when Albie shuffled into his field of vision, moving erratically down the sidewalk.

Everybody’s uncle stopped all who walked by, for a quick hello or catch-up. Almost his opposite number—instead of being hunted, Albie was the one in pursuit. From the window, he watched strollers bend toward Albie’s gravity as they passed him. But then, when he pulled back, he saw another level of citizen that purposely avoided Albie. From his angle, he saw them change trajectory so they escaped Albie’s zone, crossing the street or suddenly darting into storefronts. Anything to avoid this strange man. It didn’t matter what his name was, or how many times a day they said it, wrote it on envelopes, read it on signs. The old man was weird and unsettling. And that was that. He felt guilty for his vantage point on the third floor, as if he were eavesdropping on people’s thoughts.

It was the last time he saw Albie. Winthrop’s favorite son. Why hadn’t the two freed men named the town after themselves, he wondered. Goodefield. Nice place to raise a family, they’re closing the drive-in to open a new mall, and it’s about time. Certainly the duo didn’t lack for ego. It required a certain lack of modesty to lead your followers across hundreds of miles of wilderness and whatnot, and all the homesteaders in their caravan qualified as followers in his book. He crunched the names, fed them into the input slot of his particular talent. Goode the Light, Goode Delight: a maker of vibrators. Field the Dark, Field Dark: where you find yourself when you are lost. Darkfield: manufacturer of military equipment, ordnance, and such. Darkfield Military Supply. Darkfield Secrets and Enigmas Inc.

On paper, in the official history, they were even-stake partners, but when it came to day-to-day matters, you were going to go with one or the other. The Light or the Dark. You had to pick one, he knew. To give your allegiance to, when faced with Lost White Boys or night riders or more mundane obstacles. How to shake off the nightmare. How to make it through the day. And more often than not, you were going to go with Goode. Sleep came more easily, no doubt, with his words echoing in your head. You understood deep down that what Field had to say was the world’s truth, but you were going to pick Goode every time. It was easier that way.