The Deep Whatsis (17 page)

I’m far too drunk to drive but we’re not in an obedient mood, neither of us. Getting fired always is, for a time, a prudence minimizer.

We head south on the Bowery and then Seth directs me east to a place down near the PJs below the Williamsburg Bridge, off Ridge Street. This entails making a left turn on red and I negotiate it without a problem. Yogi Boy says the big-time deals on the LES are all brokered out of a dry cleaner’s called El Jaguar.

“How do you know this shit?” I ask him and he says that anybody who ever bought drugs in New York knows Jaguar Dry Cleaners, it’s legend.

“You can find a reference to it in like a hundred songs, from the Velvets to Snoop to the Strokes,” he says. His energy is good now, he’s up. Then he tries to sing a line from some track, it could be one of those bands he likes, Bum Bum Dudes or Illiteracy Society, I don’t know.

“May the jaguar run / he goes on the ridge / May the jaguar run / down to the bridge.” I don’t know the song but the lyrics are suitably faux-secretive, the imparting of obscure drug-related insider knowledge one of the chief purposes of popular music throughout the ages. I am exhausted just thinking about all the young people in this city, their collective nonstop effort to be “hip,” which is to say, to conform, to fit in, to Obey; all definitions in time come to mean their opposite. Why are people like this? Is it fear? Of what? Death? When Seth finishes singing we are pulling up in front of the store. He pats the envelope in his pocket and opens the passenger-side door; I search for the right line.

“I don’t think this is a good idea,” I say.

“I know,” he says back to me. He hesitates for a moment before stepping out onto the curb and looking back at me behind the wheel. And then he turns and heads toward the storefront.

“Sethji,” I call out. “Yo.”

He turns back and looks at me, one hand on the door, the other gripping his cash. He’s opened it about two inches and I can tell he doesn’t really want to go inside, he’s having
second thoughts, his forearm is trembling almost imperceptibly. “What?” he says.

“I was only kidding,” I am saying to him as seriously as I can.

“About what?”

“Dog, seriously,” I go. “Don’t do this.”

“Do what?”

“Maybe you should take the money and use if for something else. Go to school.”

“And study what?”

“I dunno, man,” I say, this is new ground we’re on. I pretend to scratch my head as an indication that I’m thinking out loud, and of earnestness. “Maybe herbal medicine or something? Midwifery? Or go to law school, become a community organizer? You know. Fight the power?”

He looks at me for a long time, like he can’t tell if I am joking or not.

“Don’t be an asshole,” he says.

And then changing tone I say, “Just get in the car. I mean it.” He stands there for a second and I can tell he still doesn’t want to go inside but he’s looking for an excuse so I lean over and unlatch the passenger-side door and throw it open. He takes this as a good enough cue and gets back in the car and we sit there for a moment in utter silence. Then I take him home.

A few days later
I have to return to the Tate offices in order to sign my severance papers; I get six months of pay and a year of benefits but because I breached my contract with an HR violation, they’re giving me half that. Not bad. I take the subway to Thirty-fourth and walk to the Tate Worldwide building, panopticon of shame. I go to the benefits department and meet with a woman I had never seen before, her name is Angeline. I sign a bunch of papers without reading any of them and I go. No one greets me, no one notices me, no one says hello; this is my legacy after two years of toil. While I’m with Angeline I ask to use her phone and I dial Barry’s number. He doesn’t take my call. I dial HR Lady’s number and she doesn’t answer; I leave her a long message asking her if she got my e-mail or my fax or my text about compensating the people we fired with the bonus I was going to get and the one she surely will, about how is it people like us get seduced by this
system, and how it’s a shame but I always felt there was something between us, unspoken, and in different circumstances we might have meant something to each other. Then the voice cuts me off and asks me if I am satisfied with my message and I press 2: no. No, I am not satisfied with my message.

As I’m coming out of the building I see Henry Graham, my ex-colleague, lingering there across the street. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t see me and so I have a few seconds to decide do I turn around in order to avoid him, do I keep going in order to avoid him, but then it’s too late, he’s right in front of me and looking right at me. I stop and smile at him and offer my hand. He doesn’t take it.

“Henry,” I say, shifting gears, “how are you?”

“Not bad, you?” he says. I keep my distance, thinking that if I were him I’d be punching me in the face now. But then I realize that a man in need of work doesn’t entertain such thoughts around his former boss.

“I was going to e-mail you,” I say, “but they shut off my account. I wanted to tell you that, um, it was pretty shitty what went on there and I’m, um, sorry about what happened.”

“Oh sure, man,” he says half-heartedly.

“They fired me, too, you know,” I tell him. “Just a few days ago.” Is this what a human would say? It occurs to me that it might be.

“Yeah, I saw that on Agency Spy,” he says. I look down at his feet and see that he has bought some new John Fluevog boots: it’s possible the man is trying to youngify himself. It’s also possible he has begun to dye his hair, I can’t quite tell in this light.

“How’s it look out there?” I ask him, thinking that as out-of-work creatives we share something.

“Tough market, you know,” he says with a shrug. “Tough market.” I shrug back and we share a laugh, or should I say that I laugh in the hope he will join me.

“If I hear of anything, I’ll let you know,” I go. Still he says nothing. Then I ask him if he wants to have lunch.

“Now?” he says, looking at his watch.

“Why not?” I say. “On me.”

I stand there and wait for him to answer. He looks around as if he’s expecting to see someone he knows on the street, but he doesn’t, and then smiles, more to himself than for my benefit, it seems to me. He grunts a strange kind of anxious grunt under his breath. Then he looks at me and I think he’s going to say something, he’s breathing in as if in anticipation of speaking, and then I see his hand go into his pocket and emerge holding what looks, for a second, like a gun, and I realize a nanomoment later something very interesting: it
is
a gun. A Beretta Tomcat Small Caliber Tip Out with a snag-proof design that permits quick presentation I was later told.

He’s shaking it as he presents it at me.

“Henry,” I say. “What are you doing?” I laugh the laugh of someone who doesn’t fully believe he is standing in front of a desperate man holding a gun.

“Fuck you, Eric,” he says. “You’re a cunt.”

“I know,” I say. “I know that. Everybody knows that. Let’s go eat.”

For a moment I think it’s worked, that he’s going to put the gun away, or that I had only imagined it, that he never had a gun, that it was a phone.

But then he pulls the trigger of the gun and the trigger slams against the charge and the charge explodes in the narrow barrel, sending the necked-down Hornady V-Max .17 cartridge hurtling toward me. The tiny armor strikes me in the right side of my shoulder and I am knocked back a few feet but not to the ground.

A second explosion occurs and I feel nothing; this could be explained by the possibility that the bullet has hit me in the face and blown my head apart before I had a chance to feel it, but this is not the case: I feel nothing because he missed. Although there is a ringing in my ears.

Then he fires again, the third time being charmlike as the V-Max strikes me to the left of my solar plexus, a good hit, and as I am falling down and Henry Graham is running off down the sidewalk, people are scattering. My head hits the pavement and I black out.

I black out for what I later construe to be ten or eleven seconds; when I come to and look around, Henry is gone and there are people screaming and asking me if I am alive and then there are sirens, and cops, more screaming, more sirens, an EMS guy wearing plastic gloves that make him look like he works at a food truck, and then I’m moving, there are doors, hallways, men in blue shirts asking me questions, men with white masks talking to each other, needles, tubes, and very very bright lights.

One of the advantages
of the midcentury modernist aesthetic is it’s easy to pack up your things when you need to relocate, especially when you don’t have any things. My moving company, called Green Transitions, is the first environmentally conscious moving company in New York (our boxes are made from recycled bamboo byproducts and our trucks run on bio fuels). As it happened, the first of Henry’s tiny bullets had entered my shoulder muscle, luckily avoiding my humerus, scapula, and subscapularis, and exited cleanly out the back in a straight shot. The second hit above my abdomen, perforating the mesentery connecting my inferior vena cava to my small intestine, taking a sharp right and exiting without touching my spine, liver, or anything else of major value. Some call it a miracle. I call it a very informative eight days at New York Presbyterian followed by two weeks in bed watching every Preston
Sturges film there is on DVD, twice, I found his oeuvre quite compelling, it had been strongly recommended to me as therapeutic by Seth. “His approach to comedy is somewhat Buddhist,” Seth informed me as we watched
The Great McGinty
, “seeing as how he refers to life as a ‘cockeyed caravan,’ which can be thought of as another term for samsara.”

“Cool,” I said. “Let’s watch that one again.”

Seth, carless and jobless, had gotten back together with his girlfriend, the one he thought was breaking up with him, and they told me they were starting this Etsy business together selling handmade hemp yoga mats, although they might have been joking, I couldn’t tell.

Apart from a couple of visits from the two of them, and various food delivery people, and a few messages traded back and forth with my father, I didn’t really talk to anyone, I wasn’t after all in much of a social mood.

And then, finally, toward the end of week two, I got a series of texts pinging me in succession; they were from someone called BLOCKED.

I didn’t text her back right away but then when I finally did (
Sabi! call me!
) I realized I didn’t know you could block a cell phone but apparently you can and so therefore I had no idea if my response even got to her, so I sent it again (
r u kidding me? call me!!
) and then a third time (
pleez?!?
) but received nothing in reply. I tried her old number but it was out of service. Had she moved? I didn’t know. I tried locating her on Facebook but she had told me she wasn’t even on Facebook and besides, I didn’t know her last name. So I watched
movies and waited, and waited some more, and then one day I realized I could put my pants on without feeling like someone was stabbing me.

The last of my furniture
is being taken into the freight elevator and the Green Transitions Relocation Team is loading it all into the truck. There are still two months left on my lease and I wasn’t able to negotiate an early termination agreement to my liking so I’m just going to have to pay and leave the place empty. Now that everything is gone—I put the little cactus into my Rimowa suitcase last—I look out the east-facing windows at the skyline of Manhattan for a moment or two, it seems like the right thing to do as a sign-off. I count four private helicopters hovering above the East River; I take this as a sign that the economy is improving, but not for everyone.

For some reason I don’t want to go, not just yet.

I have the rest of the afternoon free and consider paying Dr. Look a visit before I go, perhaps to discuss the feelings that I’m having about Sabine and her sudden and not completely surprising admission—I knew there was something weird about Tom—but otherwise I must admit it took me by surprise to have been played like that. Or perhaps I should just explain to Look that the story about my mom was fiction, the lie that tells the truth as it were, and that there are other stories I could have told him, that I could still tell. Then I dig out the card he gave me, it was in a folder of so-called important papers. I dial and a
shrill voice tells me the number is out of service, please hang up and try again. I drop his card in the toilet and empty the last of my Xanax, Klonopin, Adderall, OxyContin, Percocet, Ativan, Zoloft, Wellbutrin, and Advil into the bowl and I flush. Then I grab my 1960s airline travel bag updated in Vachetta leather by Rag & Bone, consider turning off the bathroom light as I leave but don’t, and walk out into the hallway where the elevators are. My phone rings and I can see by the 212 number it’s the police precinct calling yet again; I had told them ad infinitum that I didn’t get a good look at my assailant and couldn’t even tell what race he was, or how tall, or what he was wearing, or if he was a woman, but something about my fabrication must have seemed to them like a lie because they keep persisting in questioning me about it. I decline the call for the very last time and head out of the building named Krave.