The Broom of the System (49 page)

“Rick? Am I interrupting?”

“....”

“I can come back.”

“What is it.”

“It’s just about this kid-putting-himself-through-prep-school submission. Is the
Physicians’ Desk Reference
a real book, or is it just a made-up name?”

“The P.D.R. is real.”

“.... ”

“It numbers among its features a cataloguing, chemical breakdown, manufacturer, dosage, and contraindications for almost every known form of prescription medication available in the United States, in a given year.”

“Oh.”

“People seriously interested in drugs and things medical, but particularly drugs, swear by it.”

“Even kids?”

“Especially kids.”

“How come you know all this?”

“I knew a child who swore by his copy of the P.D.R. Who used to keep it hidden in his toychest, under his old football pads and helmet.”

“Your son?”

“.... ”

“It‘s,pretty late, you know. The lake’s all spoiled mayonnaise now, see?”

“....”

“Look, I’m sorry I was testy at lunch. Dr. Jay had just got done being incredibly weird and obnoxious. I’m seriously considering not seeing him anymore. I think we need to talk about it.”

“Do we.”

“Anyway, I’m sorry.”

“Not a problem at all. Not a problem, at all.”

“Are you going to work much more? Is that Norslan stuff?”

“No. Yes.”

“Is Andy still around?”

“I’m afraid I don’t know, Lenore.”

“You should have heard what he said to Candy this afternoon, at Mr. Bombardini’s meeting. You want to hear about it?”

“Not particularly.”

“Are you going to work much more?”

“I haven’t picked up my
Plain Dealer
yet. I believe I’ll drop down and pick it up and catch up on things, for a bit.”

“You don’t feel like going to dinner, then?”

“.... ”

“Um, maybe I’ll just stay out at Mavis’s desk and do some more submissions, and wait until you maybe want to go.”

“....”

“Are you OK?”

“Come closer. I can’t see you in this light.”

“Look, I’m sorry I said that that Fieldbinder story you obviously liked sucked canal-water. It was one an eminent friend sent you, right? It all became clear to me this afternoon. Let’s consider it one of the things that keened my pitch. I took it off the rejection pile. I asterisked it.”

“Not a problem at all.”

“So should I wait for you, for dinner?”

“Do whatever you feel valid and three-dimensional doing, Lenore.”

“Pardon me?”

“In answer to your question, the
Physicians’ Desk Reference
is very real. It has transcended its context, one might say.”

“Are you sure you’re OK? Was Jay a total shit to you too?”

“Just feel a bit ... tired and small tonight. A little coyote-ish.”

“Coyote-ish?”

“....”

Nearly six, the sun low and the shadow full and the watery lights lit high overhead in the lobby ceiling, Judith Prietht was closing up shop and getting ready to shut down the console for the night, the Bombardini Company getting more than enough legitimate calls during business hours. Into her shopping bag went the limp-necked sweater she had almost finished knitting; off went her slippers and on went her street shoes; now off when her console (Position Release and Position Busy pushed together shut down a Centrex 28 equipped with a special Shutdown feature, which the Frequent and Vigorous console wasn‘t, and could only be put to rest by removing the console cable itself from its jack in the back with a ratchet wrench, an option exercised on more than one occasion by Vern Raring in the really empty, quiet part of the night); off went her lamp, leaving the Frequent and Vigorous half of the switchboard cubicle in a softer kind of light; on went her hair net; in went a Certs. Out she went, blowing a not-returned kiss to Candy Mandible, home to feed her cat.

Candy sat smoking again, waiting for Vem Raring to come in at six, trying not to look at the little clock over the console while she told the latest Lang story to Walinda Peahen, who sat completing time sheets for submission to Payroll the next morning, Friday. Walinda was not in a good mood, having been kept overtime in her other job at Frequent Leisure Suit today, but Candy Mandible was the kind of woman who tended to ignore moods not caused directly by her; and since Walinda Peahen was the kind of woman whose bad moods tended to be made worse by people around her behaving as if she were in a bad mood, she and Candy actually got on fairly well, and it was Candy who had originally gotten Lenore her job, this fact now being the only really sore point in Candy-Walinda relations.

“Be needin’ to hire somebody else now that the girl finally got promoted by her squeeze,” Walinda had said.

“Only a temporary person, though,” Candy said. “Because she’s only going to be helping Mr. Vigorous temporarily, while he’s incredibly busy with the Stonecipheco account.”

“Huh,” said Walinda. She turned eyes thick with shadow on Candy. “Girl what you mean Stonecipheco? Vigorous told me it was a big new Norslan account they got.”

“Andy Lang told me that’s what Mr. Vigorous is supposed to tell people,” Candy said, turning slightly to avoid blowing smoke in Walinda’s face. “But it’s really not. It’s really Stonecipheco baby food.”

“And that crap be
nasty?”
said Walinda. “On sale once, and I give it to my child, and he like to die. Lenore be makin’ some foul-ass food, for all her money.”

“Lenore doesn’t make the food, Walinda, you know that.” Candy sighed. “And you know she doesn’t get any money from it. And just please remember to only hire somebody temporary, is all.”

Walinda didn’t say anything, and Candy launched into the Lang story.

“It was a scream,” she said. “I died. I laughed so hard that I died.”

Walinda worked the adding machine and didn’t say anything.

“I know you couldn’t come,” Candy continued, “but you know today Mr. Bombardini was having a meeting for everybody in both firms in the Building? You got the memo about that, right?”

“I got it. And I heard y‘all just had to hear the fat man talk about his Building.”

“Well it was just really bizarre, is all I can say. He was on this platform, with these like eight incredible hunks in loincloths holding him up in the air, and he was going on and on about how we all needed to begin to reconcile ourselves to having less space in the Building, because there was going to be a steadily decreasing amount of space for us, and then he stopped even mentioning the Building at all and. started talking about there like being less space for us in general, like the world was getting small or something, and he had this weird fiendish light in his eyes, and plus it looked like he’d gained about a thousand pounds or so, and he kept looking at Lenore like he wanted to eat her, and kept dropping all these hints about how there could be some space for some of us if we came around and played our cards right. Bombardini’s totally infatuated with Lenore, ever since his wife left him for a yogurt salesman. He sends her flowers almost every day.”

“Maybe she can get us a bigger cubicle in here, then,” Walinda said thoughtfully, adding up hours.

“But anyway the point is that it was supposed to be an incredibly serious meeting, and it was really a tense scene, and deadly quiet, ‘cause everybody’s scared to death of Mr. Bombardini,” Candy said, blowing a ring and putting a red-nailed finger through it. “So it was deadly quiet, and Bombardini was going on and on, and this Andy Lang guy was sitting right in front of Lenore and me, and he all of a sudden starts turning around in his chair, really slowly, and looks all intensely at us, like he’s got something really important to say, and we lean forward, and he leans back to us, and he whispers to us, real loud, ’I have an erection.‘ ” Candy began to laugh, with big breaths, making Walinda laugh too. “And I died, and started laughing, and it was even worse because it was such a deadly quiet and serious situation, and Lenore started laughing too, and we couldn’t stop. And then but Lang turned back around innocent as can be and started listening to Mr. Bombardini again, and there we were dying, laughing like hell. It was ... awful.” Candy was laughing so hard that smoking became impossible. She dropped her cigarette in an old can of Tab, where it hissed and fizzed and died.

Walinda chuckled. “Ooh child. What’d Lenore’s little man think of that, I wonder. Was he sittin’ in her lap at the time?”

“Mr. Vigorous wasn’t there,” said Candy. “He apparently had some kind of appointment. I think you two were the only ones not there, of the day people.”

Walinda wet her finger and turned a time sheet. Candy started to get her things together in preparation for Vem’s arrival. Into her purse went her pack of Djarum; on went her shoes ...

“Excuse me,” said a voice in front of the switchboard counter. “I’m looking for Mr. Lang.”

Walinda looked up briefly and narrowed her eyes and went back to her adding machine. Candy straightened up from putting on her shoes and looked into the eyes of Mindy Metalman Lang.

“I’m Mrs. Lang,” the woman said coolly. “I’m here looking for Mr. Lang. My husband. I was told by someone on the phone that he works here, even though the number they said was his when they put me through to him didn’t answer after thirty rings.”

Candy didn’t answer right away. She was busy staring at what she, Candice Eunice Mandible, would very probably be, had she not had the ever so slightest bit of an overbite, and had she had perhaps ten more judiciously distributed pounds, and eyes more like wings, and had she been rich per se. She saw perfection; she smelled White Shoulders; she assumed the fur jacket was sable. This was an enormously beautiful woman, here, and Candy stared, and also unconsciously began smoothing the tight old violet cotton dress she had on.

Mindy was staring back, but not really at Candy so much as at Candy’s dress. Her eyes faded a bit, as if she were trying to latch onto an elusive memory. Her eyes were different from Candy‘s, too. Very. Where Candy’s were light brown and almost perfectly round, giving her face almost too much symmetry, making it an almost triangular face when it would have been nicer and more comforting as a rounder, more vague-at-the-edges face, Mindy’s eyes were so dark they were almost black, and they seemed to spread out far more across the upper ridges of her cheeks, and back at the sides, like the wings of a dark sort of fluttery bird: large, delicate, full of a kind of motion even when still. Really nice eyes. A face very much like Candy’s, but vaguer at the edges, and so really better. Candy smoothed at her dress some more.

“Girl what you doin‘, employee addresses in the directory,” Walinda said to Candy, and she pushed the directory across the white counter until it hit Candy’s hand. “Wrote his address down at the back myself,” Walinda said.

Candy didn’t have to look at the directory. “Mr. Lang’s temporarily staying in a building in East Corinth, which is a suburb south of here.” She smiled at Mindy. “Actually the same building, or house is more like it, as mine, which is how come I know, although it’s a rooming house, so still like a building; it’s not like he’s living in my house.” She laughed breathily.

“I see,” Mindy said with a bit of a smile, nodding. “Perhaps then you could just jot down the address for me.”

Candy reached for a pad and pen and jotted.

“There was, too, the office number, which the operator tried before,” said Mindy. “Perhaps you could try him again for me. What ... department is he in?” She looked around her at the marble lobby and the soft red chairs for lobby-dwellers and the tiny veins of the last bit of sunset moving together in the blackness of the walls.

“Translation,” Candy told her, not looking up.

“Translation?”

“Baby food,” Walinda Peahen said, flashing hostile green-shadowed eyes at Mindy’s fur jacket and then returning to tax forms.

“Baby food?”

“Nix,” Candy murmured into Walinda’s ear. She stood up and pushed the Tissaws’ address across the counter to Mindy.

“And I’d ring his office for you, but I happen to know he’s not there, Candy smiled. ”He left the office after a Building-wide meeting, about three this afternoon. I know more or less where he’ll be tonight, though.“

“Do you.” it

“He’s going to be in a bar called Gilligan’s Isle with an old friend of his, watching religious television.”

Mindy was putting Lang’s address into a really nice Étienne Aig ner purse. She snapped it closed and looked up. “Religious television ? Andy?”

“One of the ... The show features a bird who belongs to a friend of mine, and of Mr. Lang‘s,” said Candy. “We’re all going to try to watch the bird tonight.”

“A bird? Andy’s going to watch a bird on religious television?”

“Gilligan’s Isle is just right across Erieview Plaza from here,” Candy said, pointing in the correct direction out through the revolving door of the lobby. “It’s pretty easy to find. Has big colored statues in it.”

Mindy was staring at the violet dress again. She looked up into Candy’s round eyes. “Have we met before?” she said.

“No we haven‘t, I don’t think.” Candy shook her head and then cocked it. “Why?”

“I’m not sure. I don’t mean to be impolite, but I know I’ve seen that dress before.”

“This dress?” Candy looked down at herself. “This is an incredibly ancient dress. It used to belong to a friend of mine, the person who also owns the bird I just mentioned. Do you know Lenore Beadsman?”

The console began to beep. “Wait a minute,” Candy was saying to Mindy. “You mentioned Lenore on the phone when I talked to you.” Mindy just looked at her. Walinda was making no move toward the console. Candy bent to the call. A rapid, in-house flash. “Operator,” she said.