The Learners: A Novel (No Series) (17 page)

I’m a murderer.

“Oh, why thank you. That’s very interesting, I never thought of it that way.” He rolled that around in his head, jotted something down. Then he looked back up at me. “Are you feeling better now? Are you well enough to go home? You can stay here longer, if you like.”

“No, I’m fine, really.” I wasn’t. He could tell.

Milgram leaned forward, put his hand on my arm, a sincere effort to soothe: “Please believe me: just because you performed the way you did doesn’t mean you’re a bad or sadistic person. Not at all. You really did
want
to stop, we knew that. And frankly, you did. That’s admirable.”

No, I didn’t stop. I fainted.

“What we’re studying here is a context, a situation that often produces its own formidable momentum. You’re an ordinary, moral person who was placed in a situation of deep consequence.”

And I’m a murderer.

“Thank you,” I said, “I appreciate that. I’m feeling much better now.” A big, fat lie. We stood. “So, can I ask, how many people will you be testing?”

“I think three hundred. It will probably take at least a year. We’re still not sure.”

“And what are your findings, so far?”

All three of them exchanged quick, uneasy glances. Milgram: “It’s too early on to tell. We’ve got a lot more subjects to look at before we can. But we’ll be sending each participant a full report once the experiment is done and we process all the data. So far it’s been very interesting.” He cleared his throat. “One more thing before we send you on your way. It’s very important: We’re asking you to please not share what happened here today with anyone. Not even your family. All of our subjects are from the New Haven community, and it’s vital to our research that none of them know anything about this ahead of time.”

“Yes, yes, of course.” I shook Wallace’s hand, I checked his wrist for scars. He chuckled.

“And if for some reason you need to contact us, or have any questions, please don’t hesitate to do so.”

“Thanks.” This was a lot to take in, but something occurred to me. Something I caught.

Throw it back, make myself say it: “Dr. Milgram?”

“Yes?”

“You asked me, earlier, if there was anything, anything at all that Wallace could have said to make me stop. At the time, I couldn’t answer, but now, now that I know…”

“Yes?”

“Well, I know it’s not very clever, but now that I’ve been able to clear my head a bit, the answer’s obvious.”

His face lit up. “What?”

“It’s this: Had Wallace told me what was actually happening, had he been honest with me, then. Then I would have stopped.”

He wasn’t expecting that. “…hmmmm.”

“You did say ‘anything at all.’ I realize that doesn’t help you.”

“No it’s, it
is
helpful. I’ll have to think about it.”

Please do. I gathered myself, we made our good-byes.

Then, halfway through the door, I turned back to him. I don’t know why I said it, or of course I do: “I hope the ad’s been working for you okay.”

“The ad?” He looked at me quizzically. “Actually, now that you mention it, the ad doesn’t seem to be generating the number of responses we’d hoped. We’re thinking of trying direct mail.”

Ugh.

I hated direct mail, but hate wasn’t a strong enough word. Direct mailing pieces were the uninvited guests of advertising. Straight into the garbage. Ads needed to be attached to something—magazines, television, newspapers—anything that made them a legitimate part of the show. Otherwise they were diseases without hosts. How could he not see that?

“Right. Good luck.”

There are no further obligations.

Feet of lead up steps, outside, to the next world, one that I was only now, at that very instant, starting to recognize. I didn’t know what time it was—it was overcast, but I could tell the sun was starting to set. Or, maybe that wasn’t it at all.

Maybe it was the air. Turning black.

SEPTEMBER–NOVEMBER.

Tip, suddenly next to my desk: “Did you see this?”

Me:….

“Hello?”

“Sorry, I…”

“You okay? You look like you swallowed a toad three days ago and are still waiting to burp.”

“Heh.” I stirred myself back to life, sharpened my blue pencil. “Did I see what?”

“This, you wing nut.” He slid the newspaper right over my half-ruled coupon for twenty percent off a perma-tint at Jilda’s Black and Blond Beauty Room. The front page of the
Register
, above the fold. The lead story:

I glossed over the rest, something about building codes and monetary feasibility, a shot in the arm to the local economy, et cetera. Thoroughly uninteresting.

“So, what about it?”

“The Meems says she wants it, that’s what.”

“Wants what?”

“The
account
, sweetness.”

He explained: The instant she got wind of the news, roasting under a Promethean hair dryer at Jilda’s, Mimi vowed with dog as her witness that the Buckle Shoe ad business was rightfully ours. And we would stop at nothing until it was.

At first, Tip dismissed it as a whim. “Oh, she wants
lots
of things. Legalized bestiality. Breasts. A Chanel suit made of bubblegum. Jack and Jackie over for tea. Then she forgets about it. This too shall pass, worry not.”

Worry not. Now
there
was a concept.

Because you see, Tip didn’t really know—how could he—who he was talking to. And I wasn’t so sure now myself. Was he talking to the designer, the me who was finally finding his way in the working world, actually taking the next great step in his life?

Or was he talking to the murderer? The me who tortured and killed a total stranger. And got away with it. The me I was still becoming acquainted with, the me with the great secret.

And to think I used to
love
secrets.

“Downstairs. Everyone. Mimi’s office.” The next day, Tip’s head in the doorway, grim: “Cancel lunch. Notify next of kin. Batten down the hatches. Smoke ’em if you got ’em.”

“Oh for land’s sake.” Sketch was in the middle of a full-pager for the Food Clown’s Back-to-School Bacon Blitz. A five o’clock deadline. This was not on the agenda.

“Sorry, cap’n. Meems has spoken. She is calling us to her bosom. Such as it is.”

Did that mean me? “Uh, should I…?”

“You, too. She said so.” Yowza.

We filed in. Sketch, Nicky, Preston, Tip. Even Miss Preech was there, a steno pad in her lap, pencil tip on her tongue.

Mimi’s office. Her lair. Originally the fire chief’s bunk room, Mimi brought the flames inside, lapping at every available surface—the curtains, sofas, rugs, Erté prints, the modernist table-desk shaped like a mutant amoeba, too many needlepoint pillows to count—all bore a riot of colliding shades of magenta, plum, lava, blood orange, and Pepto-Bismol. Anything vulvic and volcanic. I will admit: the reflected amber light made our skin look sensational.

“Okay, everyone…” Perched on her fuchsia velvet settee, Hamlet’s massive head embedded in her lap and his motionless body trailing to the floor like a fallen oak, Mimi surveyed us—her fiefdom—with imperious zeal. She stiffened her back straight with purpose, a wizened Joan of Arc in a salmon cashmere sweater set and pearls, the freshly lit Winston in her right hand her broadsword. She pulled her small, pinched mouth tight and coiled in front of her chin, like the drawstring of a dufflebag. With a tilt of the head, a deathless gleam in the squinted eyes (crow’s feet, size twelve), Mimi was ready to impart upon us the forbidden wisdom of the cosmos, to lay bare the very secrets of the meaning of life itself, the molten air surrounding her still—thick and leaden with the gravitational pull of Mercury:

“Shoes.”

A pause. Then she added with accusation, as if identifying a rapist in a police lineup:

“Buckle. Shoes.”

Sketch was already doodling in fourth gear, rendering a hangman’s noose made out of a notched leather strap and a metal clasp.

“They have been dropped onto our doorstep, and we are NOT turning them away. We are taking them in. This account was meant for us. It’s a
sign
. I know about such things. What we must do—” Hamlet started to yawn and then fell asleep in the middle of it, not bothering to close his mouth “—is let them get a load of us.”

Surely some of this was fueled by the trouble we were having with Krinkle, but Tip later told me he suspected it had a lot more to do with the firm’s “glory days” with Buster Brown—that she steadfastly believed we had some sort of legacy-borne right to represent one of the biggest shoe companies in the country.

Yes, the campaigns done here in the 1930s for BB were brilliant, in their day.
Hold Your Tongue! Tie Your Games! Skip Your Cares!

And as Tip would have been quick to remind, they were all Lars’s. Preston wrote the body copy, but it was all in the headlines, and that was Lars. Over thirty years ago, during another era. A dead one.

“Mrs. Rakoff,” Tip started, “just how do you want us to proceed?” He said it with all seriousness, but the twinkle in his eyes betrayed the sheen of pure folly. We might as well have been a rural band of French peasants in 1944, plotting to storm the Reichstag.

“Well, Tipsy, I’ve been thinking about that.” Hand to the rear of her skull, she gently caressed the eave of her giant, poofy bottle-blonde flip, fresh from Jilda’s perma-caress. “And I’ve decided what is best is to come at them from both directions.”

“Both…directions.”

“Yesssss. We’re going to divide and conquer.”

“Divide.”

“Precisely. I have thought about this very hard, with my
entire
brain.” Mimi aimed her gaze on Tip, as if trying to zap him into another plane of existence with infrared laser-heat vision. “We’re going to show them two completely different ideas. You and Sketch will work on one campaign,” she turned to me. “And Preston and the boy will devise another, simultaneously.”

The boy? Me? Working with Preston, why?

Miss Preech scrawled like mad.

Tip’s eyebrows launched in protest, Sketch’s did something like the same. Preston’s remained fixed on the
Register
’s daily Word Jumble.

Tip glared at me, helplessly, for a moment. I knew what he was thinking—the teams were mismatched: he and I should be working on this, and Sketch with Preston. It should be the Rookies versus the Vets. We’d basically been training for this since I got here. “Mrs. Rakoff—”

“Unheard!” Her left hand, sheathed with industrial-strength Band-Aids, shot out toward Tip. Mimi’s head recoiled in the opposite direction, as if she were warding off Dracula with a crucifix. “I know what you will say. You don’t see the logic of it. You will.” She turned to her son, who was focusing on the handle of his putter with raptorial intensity. “Nicky, I want you to devote all your resources to scheduling a sit-down with the Buckle people. And soon.”

Snapping out of his front-nine spell, Nicky replied with a squeak, “Will do, Mummy. But just because they’re moving doesn’t necessarily mean they want to change their advertising. It won’t be easy.”

“Duly noted: Not. Fun. Let’s reconvene Thursday with a strategy update. Before lunch. Over and out!” Thus endeth the meeting. Everyone got up.

“You,” she said to me, hungrily, “stay here.”

A small firework exploded in my stomach.

Tip beamed a tell-me-EVERYTHING glance and slipped out. The others followed. Miss Preech shut the door behind her. Hamlet, mouth still open and flaccid tongue askew, made the sound of a punctured bicycle tire and shifted his head in Mimi’s loins.

I sat back down, ready to take notes. What could she possibly want with me? In the ensuing uncomfortable silence, as she studied Hamlet, I studied her. What did I see? I saw a figure from an old outdoor advertisement, painted onto the side of a tenement here in town, three stories up. A woman whose youth and glamour had been slowly eroded by decades of sun and wind and rain. Not completely gone, but what was left was fused to the brick, stubborn and steadfast. And Hamlet, the beast to her ruined beauty, easily outweighing his mistress by thirty pounds, pinned her to the earth in order to keep her from floating away into the stratosphere, like an errant prune-shaped helium balloon.

“You have a great gift,” she said, gazing deeply into Hamlet’s slack, gaping maw. Did she mean his tongue? Why was I needed to witness this? Then something occurred to me, and with the fear of presumption I dared:

“
I
do?”

“Oh, yes.” She was looking at me now. “I don’t think you know it. But you do.” Hamlet snorted in his sleep, as if weighing in. “Lars once said that there are two kinds of people in this world: those who believe there are only two kinds of people in this world and everyone else. I’ve never, ever forgotten that.”

What?

“Listen to me.” She kept me hard in her sights, this was the crux of it: “Your life will
become
Buckle Shoes. You will eat, drink, sleep, sing, live, die for shoes. That’s what Lars used to do—when he knew we had to have the business and he knew we didn’t have a chance. And he didn’t care—what mattered was that we needed it and he’d have to find a way to get it.” She adjusted herself under the dog’s heft. “But of course I wasn’t part of it then. I didn’t become part of it till he was gone, when I
had
to. Who else was going to?” She asked it as if I was supposed to give her the answer.

“I can only imagine what—”

“Why am I telling you this? Well, why shouldn’t I? What else do I have to tell?”

“Mrs. Rakoff, I—”

“You will work with Poop.” Serious. “You will wake him up. He sleepwalks. Since Lars left us. You will bring him back to the land of the living, and when you do, the two of you will figure out how to get us Buckle. You
can
do it.” Her gaze softened, her tone thawing into something like warm. “This account. I want this. For Lars. He.” She bowed her head, parted her lips, and planted a big wet kiss on Hamlet’s bristled pate. Her tongue brought up the rear, trailing a smidgen of her liver-toned lipstick and several slight, slick strands of hair. “He would never think I could do it.”

Mouthwash. I could think only of mouthwash. Listerine, specifically. But then I thought of this, too: “Mrs. Rakoff, I’ll do my best.” Was there any Listerine in the pantry? Probably not. Maybe some mints in a drawer next to my desk? “That’s all I can promise. And I know everyone else will, too. Tip, Sketch, they’re the best, really.”

“Thank you,” she said, ogling Hamlet’s gullet, her eyes crimson-rimmed with brine. My cue to vamoose. I did, quick and quiet, clicking the bolt of the vaginal pink door.

What was all
that
about? It’s not as if I’d done anything that would have garnered her attention. The Milgram ad? No, not at all likely.

And that only reminded me: a gift.

Mimi, you don’t know the half of it. I have been given a gift, all right. Unexpected, unwanted, unwelcome, unforgettable, unreturnable.

Surprise!

And I have been opening it, daily, for a month. And counting.

I used to love gifts, too.

When I got back to my desk, Tip was waiting, his face eager, as if I were a surgeon emerging from a long operation. Sketch was back at his bacon, conjuring exquisite, glistening strips of it in the shapes of rulers, erasers, and protractors.

“Well?” Tip sat on the edge of my chair, swiveling.

“Well, she seems to think I’m going to be able to.” I didn’t know quite what to say.

“To what?”

“To wake, I mean—to
work
, with Preston. To get the best out of him. I just don’t, I just don’t frankly understand it.”

“Heh. Good luck, sport,” said Sketch with a mirthless grin. “Don’t forget to bring the swizzle sticks.”

Thanks a lot. “But how serious is this? It just sounds crazy. Doesn’t it?”

“Mrs. R. is often wrong,” he replied, frowning at one of his drawings, “but never in doubt.”

Tip lit up a Marlboro, waved it back and forth in conversational gesture. “I’m of two minds. On the one hand, yes—it’s an egregious waste of time. We haven’t done spec work since the Eastern Connecticut Children’s Hospital. But that was years ago and a whole other ball of wax.”