Apex Hides the Hurt (2 page)

He limped around the room. He was on the top floor of the hotel and had a nice view of the emptied square. He pressed his palms to the sill. People had umbrellas now, not the compact-click found in major metropolitan areas but favorite umbrellas that they never lost, and they made a break out of doorways for their cars or homes, confident now that this was not a brief sudden shower but a rain that was going to hang around for a while. It was a bad cough that had turned into something that showed up on X-rays. The leaves fled one way, then another. From the window, the river along the square was a brown worm without a head or tail. The wind changed, and he was startled by a gust that threw spray against the panes for a few vicious seconds. The bed was safe, well-pillowed, and he made his retreat.

He had an hour and a half to kill, time he could have spent reading up on the town, perusing the information they had sent him, but he wasn’t officially on the job yet so he crossed his arms and closed his eyes. Any second a nap might creep up on him. Naps had passkeys to every room in the world, the best kind of staff. He was in the Winthrop Suite of the Hotel Winthrop on Winthrop Street in Winthrop Square in the Town of Winthrop in Winthrop County. He didn’t have a map of the area, but he told himself that if he ever got lost he should look for the next deeper level of Winthrop, Winthrop to the next power, and he would find his way.

.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .

He lost his balance as he entered the hotel bar and almost fell, but no one saw him. The room was empty, the bartender’s back was turned. He cursed himself. It would have been a bad first impression to make on a client. He often lost his balance, thanks to his injury. From time to time he could find no sure footing. It always reminded him of stepping onto a broken escalator. A little shock when things weren’t moving as they should, a stumble into surprise, a half a dozen times a day. But no one ever saw it because he rarely left his house these days. As he picked out a table, he told himself, no more mistakes. Just a few minutes ’til curtain.

He tried to figure out what was going on in the framed cartoons along the walls, but the punch lines were over his head. Portly Englishmen with round, curved bellies huddled in taverns and drawing rooms referring to minor scandals of their day. He didn’t know what they were talking about:
I HAD A MINOR WIGGLESWORTH
. What the hell did that mean? The chair sighed beneath him. It was an intimate place, twelve leather chairs and three small glass tables. The deep carpet drank all stains. No neon Budweiser signs, no popcorn machines with greasy yellow glass. The salesmen in town for the convention would be perplexed and scurry to their rooms to call their wives.

They were an odd couple, coming through the door, and surely his clients. The woman wore a light blue pantsuit and smart black shoes. She smiled to the bartender and approached in dignified business strides: Regina Goode, the mayor of the village. He reconsidered: maybe it wasn’t a business stride and power charge, but the walk of someone who had recently lost weight and was feeling the confidence of her new body. He had seen data from the focus groups of the then-unnamed StaySlim in the marketing phase and felt he knew what he was talking about. And that had to be her favorite perfume, he decided, the smell summoned gold script etched on small crystal, a spritz or two before she dashed out already late to her first pressing appointment of the day. Two syllables. Iambic, natch. He stood and shook her hand.

The white guy was Lucky Aberdeen, founder and CEO of Aberdeen Software, and he came in his costume. The jeans and polo shirt were standard issue, but the vest was the thing, his trademark was a fringed leather vest spotted with turquoise sequins on one breast that described the Big Dipper. It was familiar from TV, from the cover of the guy’s book, which had been a best-seller a year ago. He learned later that people in town called it his Indian Vest, as in “There goes Lucky in his Indian Vest,” and “I said hello to Lucky in his Indian Vest.” Details from a magazine profile came back to him. Lucky had spent some time in the Southwest after he dropped out of a fancy northeast school, and there on his back in the desert, among the cacti and scorpions, squinting at the night sky, he had formulated his unique corporate philosophy. Lucky tipped two fingers, index and middle, in greeting to the bartender and took a seat. “Hello, friend,” he said.

“Thanks for coming down here on such short notice,” Regina said. She laced her fingers and rested her elbows on the tiny surface of the table.

“Sorry for the rain,” Lucky said, “although sometimes a little rain is nice.”

He mumbled in response and nodded.

“Well,” she said, clearing her throat, “I trust you’ve had a chance to review the material we sent.”

“This is quite a unique situation you have down here,” he said. Understatements were a new hobby of his.

Lucky said, “This is a unique town.” Lucky chuckled and Regina tightened her fingers. They were trying to stick to the script, he gathered.

“I still don’t understand how you came to this point. Don’t think I’ve heard of a law like this before.”

His clients glanced at each other. The mayor cleared her throat again. Lucky said, “The wording of the law itself is a bit Byzantine, but the idea is still, it’s still on the books. It may be from a different time and a bit complicated, but the spirit of the thing is timeless.”

“Why not just have the town vote on it?” he asked. “Get it all done out in the open?”

“There are a lot of complications on that point, but I can assure you that we’re not circumventing. You see it’s the town council that handles the routine matters of law here, and there’s three of us—me, Regina, and Winthrop. When we all come together it’s a beautiful thing, but when we disagree—”

“A vote wouldn’t work in this situation,” Regina broke in, “considering the community these days and their concerns.”

Yes, he was definitely picking up on a little tension. Which one had the better hand, and who was on the verge of folding their cards? The bartender brought the drinks over without making eye contact. The man could hear everything and he wondered what the bartender thought. This citizen.

“We want to be fair,” Lucky said, “is what I think Regina is getting at. We have a lot of longtime residents here, obviously, and they think one way, and then we have a lot of people who have moved here for the business opportunities, they want to raise their families in a nurturing environment.” Lucky took a sip of his Brio, the energy drink that had become the late-night lubrication of choice in Silicon Valley. The beverage was Lucky’s way of saying that he was not so far in the boondocks that he was out of touch.

“The town is changing quickly,” Regina said.

“Right,” he said. Behind her head, the caption of a cartoon went,
PIP I DARESAY
!
PIP
!

“Rapidly growing,” Lucky said. “What we have is a kind of stalemate, and we want to be fair. So we called in a consultant.”

And there he sat. He nodded. He wondered, are they seeing the man I want them to see? That devil-may-care consultant of yore? His hand was a fist on the table. He imagined a wooden stick in his fist, and attached to the end of the stick was a mask of his face. He held the mask an inch in front of his face, and the expressions did not match. He said, “I sent an e-mail to someone’s office, I can’t remember who, about the conditions of my employment.”

“Yes, your conditions.”

“That’s what we wanted to talk about.”

“There’s some disagreement about the strict terms, but we’ll work it out.”

“They’re a bit binding.”

“That’s the point,” he said.

They looked at each other. Lucky said, “You see, Albert Winthrop’s unreachable until Wednesday. He has a boat race. But I’m sure we’ll work it out, once the three of us sit down. I think what you’re saying makes perfect sense, if you look at it through the right lens. Perfect sense.”

“Will you be okay until then?” Regina asked. “Your room is nice?” She smiled, by accident it seemed to him.

He raised his eyebrows and nodded eagerly. It wasn’t that bad a smile, as far as smiles go, a rickety ark sailing above her chin.

“I know Winthrop sent up a few books for you to familiarize yourself,” she added.

“And when you meet Winthrop,” Lucky added, “I’m sure he’ll lay a bunch of family history stuff on you.” He chuckled. “He has all this stuff in leather binders.”

“I use Apex all the time,” Regina said, sitting back in her chair. She wiggled a finger for proof. “Burned it on the stove.”

“Oh,” he said.

“Quite an impressive client list you have,” Lucky said. “Had a question about one thing, though, if you don’t mind. It said there you did Luno, but Luno is pretty old, right, it’s been around for a long time.”

“New Luno. I did New Luno. I added the
New
. They were a bit adrift, demographics-wise.”

“Ah,” Lucky said, considering this. “New Luno. My nephew drinks that by the crate.”

There you have it.

.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .

He had a limp from an injury. What happened was he had lost a toe recently. Didn’t lose it really. It was cut off with his consent and put in one of those red hospital biohazard bags. He’d seen such things on television, and what do they do, he wondered in the hospital, burn the waste in incinerators? His toe consumed by flame and wafting like a ghost through the atmosphere. Of course sometimes medical waste washed up on the shores of public beaches and there was a big news thing about it. The derelict waste-removal company. Now and again he pictured unlucky bathers. That thing they thought was a baby fish nuzzling their thighs in the surf? It was his lost little brown toe, roaming the seas in restless search of its joint.

They say you can get used to losing a toe. And he had to agree, it was not up there on the list of truly terrible injuries. Of course his socks looked funny to him. Balance-wise, the toe is not that essential and it had been brought to his attention that his limp was psychosomatic. But there he was limping.

.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .

He lingered in the bar after the mayor and the magnate left. They hadn’t yet agreed to his stipulations so he wasn’t officially on the job, and this comforted him. He lingered over his beer. For a time, cobwebby foam in thin tendrils along the inside of the pint glass was entertainment enough. No one else came in. At one point he heard sounds from the registration area, luggage wheels losing the silence of carpet as they hit the wooden floor, and elevator doors opening and closing. Then silence again.

Wednesday, he thought. Two days. He forced himself to admit that he was a bit relieved. It was the first assignment he’d taken since his misfortune and he didn’t know how things would play out once he started working again. He had this suspicion that all he had inside himself now were Frankenstein names, lumbering creatures stitched together from glottal stops and sibilants, angry unspellable misfits suitable only for the monstrous. Names that were now kin.

The bartender ran his cloth across nonexistent stains on glasses, lipstick that had not remained and specks that had not lingered. A streak of gray started at his forehead and fanned out into his Afro in a curly wedge, an ancient and hardwired pattern, in his genes. He watched the man wipe glass, hold up glass to the light to consider his handiwork. The day the bartender discovered that white spray in the mirror, as he was about to perform the daily trimming of his muttonchops, he knew he had become his grandfather, that he was truly his father’s son beyond what the surname said. It was hard not to notice that the bartender had some old-school muttonchops, real daguerreotype shit, something to aspire to. He went up for a refill and the bartender spoke for the first time since Regina and Lucky had left. The bartender said, “You come down here to clean up this mess?”

“I’m here to check things out and lend a hand if I can,” he answered. He sat down on one of the stools.

“What kind of business do you do?”

“Consulting.”

“
Con-sulting
,” the bartender repeated, as if his customer had added some new perversity to the catalog of known and dependable perversities.

“I’m a nomenclature consultant. I name things, like—”

“Hell kind of job is that?” The bartender put both his palms down on the bar. He looked like he was preparing to vault over it and throttle him.

He fell into his standard explanation without thinking. Just like old times. “I name things like new detergents and medicines and stuff like that so that they sound catchy,” he said. “You have some kind of pill to put people to sleep or make them less depressed so they can accept the world. Well you need a reassuring name that will make them believe in the pill. Or you have a new diaper. Now who would want to buy a brand of diaper called
Barnacle
? No one would buy that. So I think up good names for things.”

“People pay you for that shit?”

He was at a loss. He’d kept up a good front for Regina and Lucky, but he couldn’t muster the necessary reserves at that moment. His foot throbbed in phantom pain.

Muttonchops looked him over. Finally, the bartender said, “This is my home.”

“Oh, I know that, people live here. They called me in for a helping hand,” he said. Already this job was different. Time was, you christened something, broke the bottle across the bow, and gave a little good-luck wave as it drifted away. You never saw the passengers. But there were always disgruntled passengers out there, like Muttonchops. It was simple mathematics.

To be challenged like this, in this strange town. Might as well have his boss hovering over him, inspecting his every notion. And he was long past having any use for bosses, even before his misfortune. It was unpleasant.
De-escalate, de-escalate
, he told himself. A sign behind the bar offered,
TRY A REFRESHING WINTHROP COCKTAIL
—
SPECIAL OF THE HOUSE
. He pointed. “Uh, what’s that taste like?”

The bartender gave him a look and started toward the bottles.

“Quiet in here tonight.”

The man behind the bar huffed and said, “People are getting in tomorrow for the conference,” then paused for a moment to glare at his customer as his hands tipped in jiggers. The bartender grabbed bottles of stuff he’d never heard of. The labels were yellowed and peeling, the script on them saloon-ready: the kind of stuff they break on the bar at the start of the brawl in Westerns.