What We Are (25 page)

I sit down with my sister at the family-assembled IKEA table to a warm bowl of oatmeal topped with a swirl of honey and sprinkled with fresh blueberries. This morning my muscles feel strong, my flesh tight. I'm like an Olympic athlete. I breathe in deep through the nose and begin to eat.

She doesn't say anything. Watching me with the seriousness of a psych on call at a suicide watch, even squinting, putting an index finger to her beautifully fat Polynesian lips. Deep down, and even though she set the thing up, she deems this new sentiment of mine to be pure scam. The old attitude bubbles up in rebellion—or, rather, in support of her expectations.

“I gotta get in my antioxidants. That way I can take a dip of Cope during my first break, hit some heroin in the stall at lunch. Got any wheatgrass?”

She doesn't even smile. I feel a little pity for poor Toby and McLaughlin. Her two children, separated by thirty-one years. They're both nowhere to be found. And I can't hear the tiniest sign that they're back there in the house, sleeping, pissing, brushing teeth, weeping. I resume eating.

“I'm gonna give you some sisterly advice,” she says.

I stop eating.

“Hopefully you'll take it in the spirit it's given.”

“With condescension?”

“Don't start. You haven't even set foot in that place yet.”

“I'm purging,
mi hermana
. Getting it all out of the system before I punch my time card.”

“That's what I wanna talk to you about.”

“Yeah?” I start eating in small spoonfuls. “Where's McLaughlin and Toby?”

“Now,” she says. “I know how tough it is for you to turn that wild brain of yours off. No one's asking you to do that. Just scale it down. Trim off the excesses.”

I look up, eating, “Like prime rib?”

“Now.”

“Can you stop saying
now
?”

“Just listen! I'm gonna help you tie down your brain.” She pulls from her purse a gift sealed in the green wrapping paper of Barnes & Noble. A golden sticker across the middle is shaped like a bow. Despite dwindling readership, the corporate arbiters of literature seem quite happy these days.

“Sister. You're kind and very thoughtful, but I ain't about to read your latest self-help manual by that dingbat Texan.”

“Dr. Phil tries to help people.”

“He tries to help
ladies
. And
himself
. He's a balding Alpha male who beats up every man that sets foot on his stage.”

“Okay, let's not start the day out this way.”

“He's like a big fucking phallus up there. The women just love to serve Daddy at the pulpit. Love to get lectured on how to cope after the parakeet dies. He's got them all over his knee, paddling their backsides. Oh, Daddy! Meanwhile his wife sits there at the sermon loving that all these women want her man. She's just bristling with possession. It's disgusting.”

“Paul! Will you shut up? It's not Dr. Phil, okay? Jesus. Just open it.”

I follow her instructions. It's a planner, my first ever. I flip through the pages and see that everything is organized in boxes: by time, by date, by activity. I smile and my sister says, “Do you like it?”

I can't tell the truth. “Yes.”

“I thought it'd be perfect for you because there's a
Thought of the Day
section on each page. That'll keep you confined to one observation.
One idea. That's it. And it's gotta be succinct enough to fit into the box.”

How befitting. “Yes, thank you.”

“Now. There's no excuse. Stop running around and wasting your talent. You've got to figure out a way to live.”

I can't help but be a little skeptical about the redemptive qualities of a fancy planner. This is all I was missing in my life? Might we once and for all revitalize a flatulent American economy by mapping out our collective future in these neat little binders? Should we have Psych-Ops airdrop these babies into Baghdad like so many propaganda leaflets and untarnish our reputation in the region? The Kurds, Shia, and Sunni united at last around a little box of To-Do's for the Day, like Neanderthals squatting over the first flames of fire. I remember the old man Cyrus and his reflexive yet genuine expressions of gratitude.

His silence, his silence.

I stand up, nod. “Thank you very much, good-bye.”

“Don't let us down, Paul.”

“Speaking of us, where's McLaughlin and Toby?”

“Getting their rest.”

I want to ask, From what? but don't. I'm out the door.

“Good luck!” Tali shouts.

As if I'm going off to war and there's better than a gambler's chance that the next time we meet I'll be blank-eyed, supine, harmless on the reused sheets of a casket.

I
ARRIVE
at Santa Clara Real Estate West an hour ahead of time. Take a shy peek into the tinted window of the entrance, but no one's in the office. Walk up a winding cobblestone path along a flowing stream and an ivy-strewn bank into the interior of the quad. The songs put out by the winged musicians in the knotty-trunked sycamores are fortissimo as I pass. There's a bench near a gushing fountain under the cool shade of the thick oaks, and I take it quietly, trying not to disturb the scene. The branches overhead have reached out to one another over the decades, intermingling into a polygonal enclosure, a virtual apse of nature. Early morning light streams through the cracks of the green leafy roof in the crisscrossing angles of a disco ball, blessed angels in some encrypted gilt-edged Bible of yesteryear floating down, kissing my skin, my brow, warming me. What beauty. Manmade beauty. Or man-fabricated beauty, bucolic farmed fish. What a beautiful, man-fabricated lie.

The truth comes when the people come. Does the place remain majestic when polluted by the presence of man? That is the question, the test. It's easy to fall in love with ghost towns, condemned strip malls, weed-laden Little League fields. When no one's around.
I could find beauty in the gutter, as long as it's empty of another heartbeat. Hell, I fell in love with a four-by-eight cell in the hole in Quentin for chrissake. Used to wake up smiling. And yet, I know it's people who make a story. No such thing as intrinsic story free of the forward-pressing fingertip of man. No Adam and Eve? Then no garden, no apple, no snake. No Noah or Gilgamesh? Then no ark, no flood, no beastly tandems. The very first set of eyes that claimed this place brought a thousand other inchoate stories to it. The fragrant mountains of pine and the valleys of towering elm and the untouched oceans and sparkling rivers were merely pools of oil, yet to be put on canvas, awaiting the order imposed by the artist,
tranquillitas ordinis
, the preservation skills of the framer.

Awaiting the redeemer, the destroyer.

But this morning no one comes. I spread my arms out across the bench like a free-falling skydiver, breathe in deep through the nostrils, listen to the orchestra of birds above and around me, trickle like dripping water into a dream.

It's a day twenty-one years ago in an elementary school classroom of second-graders. I am there in the front middle of the class, for one school year. I am in love with our teacher, a widow named Mrs. Garcia, whose brown eyes and short brown hair keep me awake. I follow her all day. I am her shadow, her one true admirer. I follow her at recess and she takes my hand and says, “Paul, don't you want to play with the other kids?” I say, “No. I'd rather help you.” She is kind and lonely and I wonder how anyone in the world could ever be prettier. After class she asks me if I might stay behind to help her clap the erasers, and I say, “Oh, yes, Mrs. Garcia.” She says, “You know I adore you, Paul, you're a wonderful boy,” and I say, “Okay.” I stay. She turns away from me in the shadows of the classroom, and when she turns back around she is taking off her blouse. There in her bra and cotton skirt, she walks toward me and pats my shoulder gently and says, “It will be okay.” She sits down upon her chair and
hands me a brush from her purse and I climb up on her desk and do what she asks. I stroke the bristles down her upper back in straight lines, my hand shaking, my breath so short in my throat I feel dizzy. She says, “It's okay, Paul. It's okay.” The moles are dark against her fair skin. I pretend that I'm painting. The room is quiet like reading time, and out the window I can see the birds on their branches watching us. I am in love like never before and happy like Christmas morning all over again but worried in my stomach like the times when you lie and are about to get caught by your father, and when she is head down, crying into the bowl of her hands, I am saying back to her, “It is okay, it is okay, I will not hurt you. I promise, Mrs. Garcia, I promise.” I know what they will do and I will not hurt you. I don't care about them, Mrs. Garcia.

I am awakened by a rattling of pots. I'm not sure what the dream means on my first day of official business, but I may get to the bottom of it if I forget about it. If it comes back under a different consciousness, which is just a fancy bullshit new-age way of saying
if it comes back later
. Without my knowing it. Without willing it into being.

Meanwhile, the rattling pots aren't pots. It's the heartless tinman's distant cousin in desperate need of a can of oil—
a clinking, clanking, cluttering collection of collagenous junk!
—the engine of a gray early eighties two-door Honda Civic hatchback that is sputtering into the lot. Once it stops, my uncle emerges—or escapes—smiling.

“Hey, nephew! Are you ready for the big adventure?”

I'm walking toward him and I realize I'm ecstatically nodding, nodding, nodding. I don't know why so much but I treasure the kindness in my uncle's pleasantry and that he's not ashamed to be seen by his peers in a little box that should have been diced up at your local chop shop way before we transitioned to the new millennium.

If I were to reciprocate the kindness in my uncle's voice I'd stop right here and now, U-turn down the cobblestoned path, and sprint. All to avoid whatever kind of hurt and disappointment I'm about to
bring to my uncle's life. But I can't think like that anymore. Gotta meet the expectations of conformity, exorcise myself of the self-demon:
Out! Out! Out!

I hope I stay shut.

“Morning, Uncle.”

“Wanna take her for a spin before you punch in, bud?”

I realize the Civic jalopy is for me. I'd like to say, “No thanks, Uncle. Driving that piece of shit down the road will mark me as a target for the EPA's hit squad.” I go with the truth instead. “I don't deserve this, Uncle. I don't mind catching the bus to work, honest. Even walking. I like walking in the morning when no one's awake. Plus, I don't want to put you out, man.”

“Nonsense! Really, Paul. The deal cost me very little.”

“I guess you're not the biggest realtor in the Bay Area for nothing.”

“Listen, I didn't do a thing. Just drive it around, for Pete's sake, and see how it feels.”

“Okay, Uncle.”

“You gotta get around in this job. I have eight offices in the South Bay alone. And I may want you to do some work at a few of the offices on the Peninsula.”

“Okay. Thank you very much, Uncle. Again.”

He looks down at his watch, back at the car, hands me the keys, and says, “Okay, I gotta go. A guy named Chinaski is gonna be your supervisor. Now hear me out really quickly. You're ten times smarter than he is, okay? I want you to get used to taking orders from people like him. That's business. No way out. I'm telling you ahead of time, as a warning. You gotta smile your way right through it and produce. If you get through Chinaski and his bullshit, you can get through anyone. He's gonna give me a report after a couple weeks. Just think of it as business boot camp.”

“You're prepping me for business war, Uncle? Corporate mergers and acquisitions?”

“In every little exchange there is war, nephew.”

“Nietzsche.”

“That's right.”

“But what do you win in this deal? What are the spoils and plunder here? I mean, it seems very anti-business to hire someone like me.”

He nods, looks down at the ground. “Well, it is. In business terms, I don't win here: I lose. I am committing myself to losing a buck. But I win elsewhere. Nietzsche didn't go much for the existential. But I do.” He smiles at me, pats my shoulder. “I know this is a winner.”

“Whatever happens?”

“Now listen. You're gonna do just fine. Don't let me get you all paranoid. You were ranked number one in your high school class for a reason. You were a candidate for the Point for a reason. You've got it, man. Just do your best not to think about the complexity of things. For eight hours a day, don't take the work to any level of intellectual depth. In fact, consider it a victory if someone at Real Estate West thinks you
have
no depth. Pick your qualifications on whatever you gotta say and then take it—let's say—a quarter of the way down. Stop and let the other guy get a word in. Shaking hands isn't just about being polite. It's about balance.”

“Yes, Uncle-san.”

“While you're at work, think about ... hamburgers or something.”

I smile, squint, look over. His eyes are back on the ground again so I put mine there with him, trying not to think on the sun sliver of promise breaking through the trees. I can ruin this whole thing not just with ease but with thoroughness.

I ask, “Hamburgers?”

He looks up at me, clutches my shoulder. “And don't say, ‘How a propos, since we're all just minced meat in the grinder.' Rather, think about milkshakes. That's it! Vanilla. Okay? There's my ride. Don't worry, now, I believe in you.”

A limo. Black. Long and thick. Of course. Hah-hah-hah. La Dulce's specialty. With vanilla milkshakes. Pretty good, Uncle.

He slides into one side of the backseat of the limo and a man ducks out from the side opposite. This guy's in a pair of ironed and neatly creased khaki chinos that are sagging in the ass despite the black leather belt. He's more than slightly hunched in the neck region, like a power lifter in the gym stuck in the trapezoid pinch of a shoulder shrug. His balding head is exacerbated by the comb-over. He's looking back into the limo where my uncle is probably sitting and twiddling his thumbs, and this guy's doing his M-i-c-k-e-y-M-o-u-s-e act, but with conviction. One of Uncle's devotees. He may as well get down on his knees, cross himself, and pray. I suspect this stoolie is Chinaski. When he turns from the limo and his kiss-ass face changes into sour despot at the sight of meager me, I know it's Chinaski.