The Deep Whatsis (12 page)

I look at my desk and at my iMac for some sign that someone else has used it; I don’t know what such a sign would be, and it’s a ridiculous impulse, and not only is it absurd but I do it twice. I pick up my mouse twice and look under it. I move my mouse pad to see if it is where I usually leave it, I move it back to where it was, then I move it again. Then I walk slowly around my loftlike apartment, looking for the telltale signs of an intruder; since there is virtually nothing in the place it would be obvious if any single piece of it had been moved. What am I looking for, some trace of nothing, an outline of two-day-old dust on a perfect white lacquer desktop? No, my cleaning lady comes twice a week, the windows are never open, there is no such thing as dust. Then I take the elevator downstairs a few minutes before my car is to arrive; I look out onto the street and it’s started to rain and the car isn’t there yet.

At the front desk is a short guy I haven’t seen before. I ask him where the regular guy is, he says “Which regular guy? Janusz? Or Paolo?” I never learned the regular guy’s name, the
guy who is here in the evenings mostly, in his little black jacket and bow tie, with the logo of the management company, Superior Management, on the pocket (possible tagline:
THE NAME IS SO UNORIGINAL IT HAS TO BE GOOD™)
but since my memory of the regular guy is that he is skinny and blond I guess it would be Janusz.

“He quit,” short guy says. So I ask him if there’s any way he could look and see if someone was let into my apartment while I wasn’t here.

“You mean we let them in with a key?” he’s asking me.

“Yes.”

He gets onto his computer and does some typing and mousing around. “What is your number, sir, please?”

“Twenty-three
F
.”

“Superior Cleaning Services, Monday and Thursday.”

“Nothing else?”

“No.” I hear a car honking outside and it’s my limo so I go out. The rain has started to fall harder now and I am getting in the car when I realize that I have left my Romowa trolley in the lobby. Funny, I think, all that consternation about the packing and what if I just left it there and had to buy all new clothes on Melrose? I go back in and it’s sitting there, bright red and yellow metal, inert, like R2-D2’s battery went dead. As I retrieve it the short guy is still looking at the computer.

“Wait a moment one second,” he says in an accent that is either Italian or Czech. “It say here we let you in because you forget your key.”

“Me?” I ask.

“Yes, you come in and you forget your key and we let you in. Yes, it was Janusz do it. Before he quit and move back to Gdansk.”

“When?”

“He leave today.”

“No, when did he let me in?”

“Yesterday ago.”

In the limo riding out Grand Central Parkway to JFK we get on the Jackie Robinson Parkway, which roars through what’s left of a forest, a forest where they shot the original silent Tarzan movies before the movie business moved itself out to the west coast. Of course I have no memory of having left my key in my apartment and being let in by Janusz or anybody else because that never happened. On the other hand, two days ago was when I last saw Intern, maybe it was when we were coming back from the bar, shitfaced off our asses, stumbling in, that was the night she bumped her head on the door jamb, I can almost imagine that we were so drunk I don’t remember having Janusz let us in, and the log would not record that there were two of us, and two days back is what he meant by yesterday ago? It doesn’t make sense. It’s possible I was with her, but at the very least I’m sure I would have remembered the feeling of being mortified to be seen dragging a teenager home with me in full view of a judgmental Pole or Ecuadorian or whoever else was representing Superior Management that night. And what about Janusz’s disappearance? Why did he quit and move back to the motherland, anyway? Maybe I don’t remember him letting me in because in fact he never did let me in, he
let someone else in, perhaps a girl, somewhat reminiscent of a Photoshopped Chantal Goya, who no doubt performed favors in exchange for the favor, and then she went nuts on him, too, and so he got fired for being deemed Inferior Management and decided to leave town. It’s also possible if not much more likely that how it was done and by whom is simply not something I will ever know; with this knowledge I arrive at my terminal, swipe the driver, and go inside.

The check-in at the airport
is perfectly smooth, as it almost always is in first class, and I wait at the gate, pretending to look at my phone but really just staring at the bulge in my pants caused by the erection that my meds won’t let subside. I have to admit that Barry is no dummy, he gets it, I don’t have to worry about Barry. There was a problem, a problem with the kid, Barry is telling his old boss on the phone from Boca, the asshole doesn’t know how to keep his dick in his trow, so I, Barry, I had to handle it, I had to have a talk with him, I had to tell him how to manage his own inaccuracies, no that’s not the word, his own, what is the word, inadequacies, no, his own incontinence, oh fuck it, how’s the buffet at the club?

I realize since I’m thirsty I should have gone to the first-class lounge but I didn’t, I hate those places, I don’t know why, with the exception of the Virgin Clubhouse, and so I go to the
food court. There’s a McDonalds, a Chipotle, a Sakkio Japan, a California Pizza Kitchen, a P.F. Chang’s China Bistro, a Boston Chowda, a Cold Stone Creamery, and a Dunkin’ Donuts. I choose the California Pizza Kitchen because it has the shortest line but when I get there a family sneaks in front of me, rendering that decision invalid, and so I move over to the Dunkin’ Donuts area, which has a large open cooler filled with beverages. I stand in front of it and choose a drink. Just as I’m reaching for a SmartWater a guy there informs me that the ones in the bottom row are warm, they were just put in and the kid didn’t even bother to move them to the back where they could get cold, he just put them right in front, but the ones at the top, on the right side, are really cold, here, he says, feel this one, and he takes a SmartWater down and hands it to me. I take it from him and indeed it is cold to the touch.

“Thanks,” I say, and he nods, smiles, and moves off. Obviously he’s not from New York, he’s probably from the Midwest, from my home state of Ohio perhaps, who believes it’s acceptable to offer help to strangers. I go back to the gate and drink the water, or half of it, and then they announce that my flight is boarding. I get up and grab my Booq laptop bag and head onto the plane. I get my seat, 3A, and settle in for the flight. I down my first champagne quickly and the attendant fills me up again right away. I down that one too and she gives me a smile and a refill and some warm nuts in a small white bowl. I don’t eat the nuts. Why don’t I eat the nuts? Then a moment later she swoops in, I’m hoping to give me another glass of cheap cru, but instead she takes the nuts away.

“There’s someone on the plane who’s allergic,” she explains in an almost-whisper. “All the nuts have to go.”

As I said, I don’t like to fly; it has nothing to do with the thought that the plane might go down, I’ve many times wished for such an end, it would be, I should think, completely painless, or at worse a few nanomoments of pain, and it would certainly be an exciting experience to have, a real adrenaline rush as you plummeted, and there would be no shame in it, it would not be like getting in a car accident where you were at least partly at fault, especially if you were drunk, and it wouldn’t be like, say, getting killed in a bank robbery where someone could say, after your death, “What was he doing at a branch so far from his home?”

During takeoff I listen to the new Best Coast tracks that our music department gave me, they haven’t even been released yet, and I was promised this band was really going to blow up, which no doubt they will, as their music is really awful, asinine, and cloying. Once we are airborne I fall asleep. I dream that I am in the Tate office and someone, I don’t know who, I don’t think they even have a face, I’m not even sure if they are male or female, is running up and down the halls with a gun killing people, just randomly sticking a Glock or some other kind of handgun into cubicles and offices and blowing people away. There’s a lot of blood. But there’s no sound, so the overall effect isn’t all that different from a regular day at work.

When I wake a few hours later, the pilot is making an announcement: we are passing over the Rocky Mountains and there might be some turbulence, please fasten your seatbelts.
That’s when I realize I’m not breathing normally, I’m breathing in quick, short gasps, and my lips are dry and chapped, I must have been sucking in air through my mouth as I slept. This isn’t unusual, I oftentimes wake with chapped lips, and I have to wipe the pasty stuff off on a towel in the bathroom, or sometimes I use a paper towel in the kitchen, but the irregularity of my breathing is what’s troubling me, not the gunk.

I look around as the plane begins bouncing on some rough air, “chops” is I think what they call it, and I note that my breathing issues preceded said choppiness, so it isn’t that I’m concerned about a crash, all of us stuck in a blizzard for weeks and eating one another, no, the panic is about something else: there, I said it, here we go again, is this the big one? The first thing that comes to mind is I’m reacting to the dream I had, which I know was fairly violent and scary, but it’s difficult to know if it was a dream about some kind of subconcious fear of retribution on the part of someone I’ve let go, or if the faceless killer is in fact me carrying out my gruesome task. But either way, my feeling tone about the dream isn’t all that negative so I don’t think that’s what is making it hard, harder now, to take in air, to breathe, and guess what, it’s getting worse.

The other possibility is that I’m allergic to nuts? I’ve heard of sympathetic toxic reactions, some kind of Nut Allergy by Proxy, but I didn’t even eat them (warm almonds, cashews, peanuts), I barely even looked at them before they were jerked away. I start to glance around the plane, it’s quiet except for the turbulence, but everyone is in their seat and we’re letting it pass, a brief section of gustiness over the hills, and after a couple of
minutes of me trying to take long, deep breaths in order to even things out, I know it’s a losing battle. Here we go again and to make matters worse I left my Klonopin in my trolley.

I have to get up. I have to get to the bathroom. I undo my seatbelt and stand in the aisle and move forward toward the lav, taking big wide steps to keep my balance as the plane shudders. One of the flight attendants, with a name tag that says “
LUCY
,” is strapped to her little seat and she tells me to please sit down. I ignore her, in fact for a moment I consider flipping her the bird, and I go into the john. Once inside I sit on the toilet, on the lid of it, and hold on with my left hand to the handle, which is midway up the plastic wall. I have those thoughts of killing myself again, like I’m possessed by them, the enclosed space is not helping things, but at least I’m alone. I’ve often thought they put the handles on the wrong side in these lavatories, because if there’s turbulence and you’re trying to pee while standing up, you want the handle on the left side (which it would be if you were facing the bowl instead of sitting on it as I am now) so that you can hold your dick and aim with your right hand. But that’s something that can be explained in any number of ways. First of all, not everyone is right-handed, some people hold their dicks with their left hands while peeing, probably not that many, but some. And then of course some people don’t even have dicks at all because they’re eunuchs or, in other cases, women. And then there’s the fact that it’s probably wiser to just sit while pissing on a plane anyway no matter who you are. Finally after some time the turbulence goes and I can concentrate on the feeling of irrelievable doom that has taken hold of me, a firey, deep-in-my-chest sense that all manner
of terrible things are going to happen, not now, not even soon, but sometime, when is the only question. Please, please I pray this plane crashes, although I venture I am the only one on it who would benefit. At any rate I try to distance myself from this now time-unspecific sense of impendingness by giving it a name, I call it Meta-Doom and a brand color, which is black, and then I’m writing a brief for Meta-Doom in my head.
Key Message: Having an inescapable sense of Meta-Doom gives me social status among my peer group because it underscores my intelligence and creativity. Brand Character: masculine, powerful, aspirational, angry. Brand Look and Feel: Black. Dark. Brand Attitude: Grim. Brand Character: Kafka meets a Predator drone. Target Consumer: Eric Nye, male, thirty-three, a creative individualist who naturally makes unconventional choices while staying true to self
.

The lavatory on an airplane is an excellent place to write a brief in your head, I realize, or to just let your mind wander, which eventually I am able to do, trying not to pay too much attention to this wish to end my existence, keeping my mind on other things, such as how to market Meta-Doom to the planet, but how can I blame myself if I can’t breathe? It feels like someone is rendering me to Rammstein with a black plastic bag over my head. And then there is the banging on the door, and the voice of the flight attendant, motherly in a way, am I alright? The plane has begun its inevitable descent into Los Angeles International Airport, aka LAX, why would they add the most ominous letter in the alphabet to the letters L and A? Unless it’s to remind us all to come back, i.e., to re-LAX, be happy, and
suddenly the door is opened from outside with a special key. One and a half hours is a long time to sit in a commode without even once using the thing, and it’s the only one in first class, I realize I must have inconvenienced my fellow passengers, and now the flight attendant has busted in.

“Are you OK?” she is asking me.

“I had some kind of attack,” I tell her.

“An attack?” she says.

“I guess you would call it a Meta-Doom Attack.”

Everyone knows what that is, she nods, asks me if I am alright, do I need medical assistance, and so on. I’m guessing she is required to say these things for insurance purposes.

“We were knocking and knocking, I finally had to come in.”

“No worries,” I tell her politely. But then she looks into the lav and sees, to her sudden surprise, that someone has haltingly scrawled sentences, in English, on the beige plastic walls with a black felt-tip pen. I look back in and see what she sees: nonsense phrases written all over, I’m surprised I didn’t notice them earlier.

Immediately I recognize two things: one, that these are taglines and, two, that they are in my handwriting; it’s true I often have a Sharpie in my jacket pocket for the times when I have an idea and don’t want to type it into my phone.

“Did you do this?” she asks me. “Did you write this?”

“I may have,” I say, “I mean, that may be my handwriting.”

“May be?”

“I guess it is my handwriting.”

Why I admitted this I’m not sure. I could have said someone else did it. She looks at me with, for a moment, an intense curiosity, as if she could see through me, like I am just a diorama in a medical museum.

“I’m going to have to fill out a report.”

“OK, if you must.”

“In the meantime there are other passengers that would like to use the lavatory.”

I go back to my seat, avoiding any eyes that are looking my way, and buckle up for landing. When we reach the gate and the door is opened, a Los Angeles Port Authority officer, white, forties, with a mustache, comes on before anyone can get off. The attendant points at me and he comes to my row. He asks me if I will accompany him off the plane, they have some questions for me. I don’t argue with him, why would I? He takes me to a Port Authority office, it’s way at the end of the terminal, we walk there in total silence, mustache cop and another cop, also in uniform, he’s black and about my age. As we get to the office, the three of us, white cop leading the way
and black cop right behind me to make sure I don’t make a run for it, the brains and the brawn of law enforcement as it were, and I’m thinking if this were a TV show it would be reversed, the networks are sensitive to claims of racial stereotyping. They sit me down in a light blue room and ask me why it is I did what I did. I can’t come up with an answer and then they have me sign some kind of paper saying I will pay for the damages to the airplane, which of course I sign readily, saying that I abhor what I did, which is true, I don’t even like so-called street art, even Banksy, I hate Banksy, he’s a phony, it’s just vandalism in my book whether it’s on the side of an abandoned building or at the New Museum. Then they let me go. I go to baggage claim and my Rimowa is waiting for me; I wheel it into a bathroom and get the Klonopin and down a handful and wait, wait, for the edge to burn off.

I look at myself in one of the big mirrors in the bathroom—my face clean-shaven, my hair cascading over my ears—and I can’t believe my eyes, I am waiting for the drugs to do their thing. Is that me in there? And then, like ghosts, like nearly forgotten memes, the half-opaque faces of the fallen surround me in the glass: Henry, Dave and Bob, Gayle, Beatrice, George, Nan, Jay, Justin, Jordon, Sam, Harlan, Cyril, Kevin, Mike, and so many more, all at 50 percent opacity, looking back at me, at my face, loosed of any bodily anchor. And then Juliette, in the middle of them, staring at me, her mascara making a horror show of her face. What a world, what a world, I hear myself saying to the room, who would have thought someone so young
and weak could destroy my beautiful wickedness? I look at my reflection again and it’s as clear as night: I’m falling into the abyss, I’m done.

Then I go back into baggage claim and out the sliding doors. The weather in LA is a predictable seventy-six degrees and it’s sunny and for a moment I think I can smell burning eucalyptus in the air.