Interference & Other Stories (14 page)

“The rest of the story is a string of predictable station stops that if I were to tell it, I would carefully disguise by adding detail. In your case, seeing as this is a city with cosmopolitan aspirations—like our hero, but more on that later—I would fashion episodes in which our hero—or heroine—happens upon a benefactor or finds a magic something-lamp or lotto ticket, it hardly matters-or wins a scholarship, but!” And here he raised his hand for emphasis. “But he proves, by way of several complementary episodes, that on his way up the mountain he has not, emphatically not, lost the common touch. Call him—where am I?—okay, call him something that impedes his progress up the mountain to the castle—you tell me Come on now, don't be shy.” And here the artist cupped his ear and beckoned with his other hand. “What's that? I'm sorry, I can hardly hear you. What? Manuel!”

People looked around at one another and behind them; no one had heard anyone say anything.

“Manuel! Yes, that's good! You're good at this! Man well. Hispanic. Also a hint of “manual,” by hand, a laborer, Manny, macho, and so forth. Great! Already in the file of stereotypes. No no, don't be offended, I'll be sure to describe his features so fully even you won't notice that at his core he's a cartoon.

“At least that's what I would do if I were going to tell you that story. But, come on, you have heard it before. You know it by heart. And every time you sit there and listen to some variation of it, you make a terrible mistake. You listen and once again identify with the exceptional underdog. Your children watch you, want you to be proud, and they begin to dream of the climb. Thats what I've been trying to demonstrate here.

“So… what are the trials we'll put our hero through on his way to occupancy of the castle? I promise you that any of you can do this if you let yourself. What trials? Anyone? Come on, you've heard the tale a thousand times.” And here, once again, Pursnipov cupped his ear and leaned out over the podium. “Yes? What's that? A jealous rival? A wicked uncle? A wound? Yes, good, good, good. You see? Now there's a story you can sell!”

The people were once again looking around to see who had responded to the artist's question, but Pursnipov was going right on, so they quickly turned their attention back to the stage. “Throw in a complication at the end, in the final hour, and never, ever, question whether the company of those who live on the mountaintop, whose castle draws our hero like a magnet, are worth the trip.

“Not that it would matter if you did—that's just another way of telling the story. Gives it legs. You can throw in that alternate ending from time to time, but not too often. I mean, you can say at the end that it isn't worth the struggle and that the people at the top are vile, but the story's already done its work. Adrenaline has flowed. The ear has heard the music. The imagination is engaged. Sure as a certain rhythm gets your toe to tapping, you've been seduced again by god and now you'll listen even more attentively the next time, wondering which twist comes at the end. You're trapped. But maybe not so easily from now on. Maybe you'll hold out for a new story, a better one. If so, I shall be gratified, and proud if I have helped you see a way out of the usual darkness.”

He disappeared from view for a moment, stood drinking a glass of water, disappeared to replace the glass under the podium, then stood looking at them for a long moment before he continued.

“So, that's the first story. Call it the dominant story. So I guess we can call this the recessive story. Yes, like genes on a strand. Like DNA. I can tell by the looks on some of your faces you already know what I'm going to say. I know you don't want to hear this, but bear with me. That only goes to prove my point, don't you think?

“The other story I won't tell, that you want me to tell, that you think that you need me to tell, is the one where—call it the Samson story—call it the Robin Hood story—the one in which our hero Manuel—here we might call him Emmanuel—redeemer, savior, one who comes to set things right, redress all wrongs, reset the switches, and establish harmony on the far side of justice, in short, to give the castle dwellers their comeuppance—does his famous stuff. He brings the house down, to turn a phrase, because he has never forgotten his roots, and because he refuses to participate in the oppression and exploitation he cannot manage to keep from seeing, hard as he tries.

“There's a good opportunity for a back story here, about lovers parted and rejoined.”

Suddenly, he leaned far out over the podium with his hand to his ear again.

“What's that? What's that? That's right! I see you're getting in the spirit of this!” He pointed somewhere midway and to the left in the crowd, but no one was ever sure who he had pointed to. “Did you hear what she said? She said the hero, Emmanuel, has a girlfriend! That's right, a girlfriend from the old neighborhood who reminds him of the world he comes from. The memory, or maybe the possibility, of her love pushes him to a crisis of conscience. But now it's not a question of returning, of turning away from the life at the castle. It's a fierce moral struggle now! He sees the enslavement of his own people and his rage at this injustice brings him to turn against the castle dwellers.

“Maybe you double up the lovey-dovey stuff by giving him another girlfriend at the castle, someone he has fallen for on his way up the mountain, someone he has to spare when it all blows up.

“Be honest. Do you really want to hear that one again?”

All was quiet.

“Oh shit. You do. Of course. 1 told you to be honest and you were.

“But the stories we need are different from the stories we want. Maybe Manny is a storyteller now. Not to be self-serving, but maybe that's what it means to be a hero these days. Maybe all he can do is try out stories that make us less fearful, stories that change what we want. Maybe Manny is Manuela. Maybe Manuela is a kind of Cassandra. Maybe she tells the stories she does in the hopes that no one will have to live them. Maybe that's why she tells you what you don't want to hear. Maybe she is Maria, from Mare, the sea, Mnemosyne, the salty memory, the mother of the muses, life-giving, moon-dancing bath of beginning.

“Never underestimate how shrewd a storyteller she is. No matter where she might take you, her every story begins the same way: ‘Once upon a time, a child was born.'”

Here the maestro ducked and retrieved his water glass. All eyes were upon him as he drank deeply. Then he ducked down as if to replace the glass, but this time he never stood up again. The people waited, confused, until a man in the first row, deeply concerned for the artist, hopped up on stage to find no one there at all.

“He's over there!” someone shouted as Pursnipov climbed into the car driven by his caped escort. The car sped off only moments ahead of the first cries from the men discovering their wallets gone, and the women with their empty purses.

He looks around for a fancy ironwork gate set in maybe pink marble among billowing clouds—he knows it's idiotic, but he can't help himself; it's not that he expected it to be that way, really, but what soon comes into focus is hard to believe: three men in uniforms, one behind a desk and two on either side of what looks for all the world like a metal detector. They're all three in blue pants, white shirts, wearing peaked caps with shiny black bills. The one at the desk with the epaulets and the gold braid on his cap is him: PETER, it says on the brass identification bar over his left breast pocket.

“You ready?” says St. Peter.

“Pardon me?”

“Perhaps,” says St. Peter. He begins turning the pages of a book as big as the one that Guy's Uncle Louie used to lug around of his wallpaper samples when he was in the decorating business.

“We see it all from here, of course. A guy like you,” St. Peter says, “Come on, tell the truth, a guy like you, a guy like you named Guy”—and here he looks right and left at the other two and rolls his eyes—“he's sort of a man's man. Would you say that about yourself? That you're kind of a guy guy, Guy?”

Guy tries to shrug, but nothing happens. The saint laughs. “We see that all the time. Don't be offended, I'm not laughing at you. It's just that here we can't do that, shrug. It's endearing, actually, but here we deal in consequence, so shrugging is out of the question. Says here you have two children. Boys”

“Yes. Yes sir. They're fine boys. Were. Are. I'm sorry, I'm confused.”

“And what did you teach them?”

“Teach?”

“The boys. Your boys.”

“I taught them teamwork. Loyalty. Leadership.”

“I see.”

“That's good, isn't it? Right? That's good.”

“Depends on the work, the object, and the need, respectively.”

“So was I wrong then? I mean, I don't really get what's going on here.”

“Good! I see you've come with your desire to understand intact. That's good. But you're reading this all wrong. You'll see. This is more burlesque than parable. By the time you get here, you're out of time, so parables are useless. Step over here, please.”

Guy is facing a security checkpoint: a gate. “Please step through the pearly gate, sir,” says one of the others, presumably an angel, in a white shirt and starched black trousers. Guy notes that the gate is indeed pearly, but not made of pearl. It has the pearly purple sheen of a knob of bone. He passes through and the alarm, a cross between birdsong and windchimes, sounds.

One of Peter's helpers comes forward with a security wand. He starts removing the offending articles. “What have we here?” the angel says, and with a flourish he seems to whip Guy's lungs right out of his chest. They're blue and red, and as he holds them up, they appear to be a pair of boxer shorts. He gives them one good shake, flaps them so they make a loud noise, thwapping like a snapped towel. He brings them to his nose and sniffs.

“Cut that out,” says St. Peter, “that's disgusting.”

“These are fine, a little smoky,” the angel says as he throws them over his shoulder. They catch on the elbow of his wing, which Guy now notices for the first time.

“Military service?” says St. Peter.

“No.”

“No?”

“Is that a bad thing?”

“Could be. It depends.”

“On what?”

The angel and St. Peter exchange what look to Guy like worried glances. St. Peter makes a note. “Better pat him down,” he sighs, shaking his bald head. “You're not supposed to ask that, Guy.”

“Why not?”

“Because you're supposed to know,”says the angel. “Uh-oh. What's this?” He has taken the item from Guy swiftly and soundlessly the way a magician might take a coin or an egg from behind a child's ear. He holds it up for inspection. It looks like a squid and Guy sees it is his heart.

“Gimme that,” says the other angel. The heart's squidlike appendages are wriggling.

“No you don't. It's mine,” says the angel with the wand.

“Oh come on, just a taste. At least save me one of the tentacles.”

“Will you two cut it out?” says St. Peter. “Just give me the information. How many tentacles?”

“Eight,” says the angel with the wand. “No, nine. Sorry. And there may be a little one growing here on the underside. Hard to tell.”

“Not bad. Not bad,” says St. Peter, writing in the big book. “A nine and a half His pineal?”

The angel makes a loose fist, places it between Guy's brows, puts his lips to it, and sucks once, hard. He takes what looks like a cat's eye marble from his lips and wipes it on his gown, holds it up and looks at it. “A little murky. Not much mileage on it. Five on a scale of ten maybe.”

“Okay, so look,” St. Peter says, addressing Guy, “you're an average guy, Guy. What if we sent you back, threw you back like a fish?”

Guy thrilled at the thought!

And that's how Guy was born to Senor Eduardo Hughes and Senora Ester Roosen of Montevideo, Uruguay, nine months later. Eight pounds, seven ounces. They named him Eduardo after his father and Galeano after his mother's family name, and worried that his head was shaped like a plantain, but the doctors told them everything would be all right, that his head would get round in a few days' time and then they could worry about other things.

T
ommy, Tommy, Tommy. Here. I'm planting these begonias here. I hope they take. I can't stay long. It looks like rain again. I stopped at your mothers grave, too, and left her some of them white mums she liked. I didn't plant hers, though, just set the pot in front of her side of the stone, by where her dates are carved, and come right over here. I brought you something. Let me dig a little hole here. Put it right in here and cover it up. There. Its yours. Now listen to this story while I get some rocks around this so the goddamned rain don't wash it out.

This happened yesterday. I'm coming out of SNAK-MART with my lotto ticket same as always, a buck a day except for Sundays. Hell, the four blocks there and back's the only exercise I get these days. And Berj, the Persian—he's about it for company. I buy my ticket and he smiles. “Have good one,” he says. “You too,” I tell him. What the hell. He's not a bad guy, just not much for conversation. SNAK-MART was Mickey Fields' back when you knew it, not no more. When Mickey's wife passed on, he left it to his son John. Him you would remember. Then later Mickey died and John sold out and moved away someplace. But to hell with it, Tommy, I'm not complaining, that's just how it is.

So listen. I'm standing in this little doorway there ‘cause as I'm coming out the rain comes down, no warning or nothing. The goddamn street is boiling and the gutters are running and I look up and there's a straight line cutting right across the sky. It's dark as hell on one side, bright blue on the other. And the line is moving. Eerie, it was. Put me in mind of that time once when you were little, when the light went funny and you got shook and I said there was nothing to be scared of'cause I'd read the papers and I knew it was an eclipse. And you wanted to know what an eclipse was and I tried my best to explain it but you were, hell, I think in kindergarten. I remember saying my head was the sun, and this fist was the earth, and this one was the moon, and I'm sure I got it all balled up, but it didn't matter. You only needed to know there
was
an explanation. Or maybe that your Daddy had one for you, I don't know.