The Imaginary Lives of Mechanical Men Part 12

"All right, but think about this. How come she picks you, eh? Cause you're the only whiteface bloke around? Cause o' your debonair charm? Your vast powers of men'al concentration? Why you? Answer me that."

"Why don't you shut up."

"Oh, that's a clever one. Can't n.o.body get the best of you, can we now?"

"Shut up."

Brawley drops his head into his hands. For a long time he says nothing, and I let the breeze take me away. I'm drifting out over the river where it's morning again and the fog rises to meet me, where I can inhale and look gigantically down upon the ruins of conquest. I think of Conrad. Hemingway. I think of Louis Leakey in a dry gorge, brus.h.i.+ng away a continent with his brushes. And of her.

From far away I can hear him saying, "They got a s.h.i.+pment. Over there in Kinshasa. s.h.i.+pment from the States, couple of cases of that Surymin. N'Reara's brother-in-law or somethin'. Says there's a doctor'll get you a course o' treatment for a thousand dollars American. Might be just a rumor, might be true."

"Why are you telling me?"

"'Cause. Blokes like you and me. Nothing else out there, Pogue. Nothing. Blue Nile's already been discovered. Victoria Falls. Killymonjare-o. Zimbabwe. No diamond nuggets just lying there on the riverbank-not here, not anywhere else in Africa. You understand what I'm sayin', Pogue?"

"I hear you."

"No more Stanley and Livingstone. No more pyramids. No lost city of gold. This is it. This is all we get. No more safari. This, right here, is it. And I hate this f.u.c.kin' h.e.l.lhole. I don't know how I got here in the first place. But I need another river, Pogue. A clean one."

I remove my socks for no good reason and drape them delicately over a stanchion, trying, I suppose, to delay the instant when I open the hatch and inhale the darkness. So I think of socks. How disposable they are, how unnecessary in most of the world. How frightened I am of cutting my feet when I descend. So now I sit on the side of the pilothouse and lace my shoes tightly, making mechanical effort. Working with unnecessary precision, the way old fishermen mend their nets. And I am a painted man, coated with muck from half-wading, half-crawling across the mudflat, greased on the outside and unrecognizable even to myself. The air is damp, so I move comfortably without cracking or creaking.

The barge rests on its side in about eight feet of water, the stern fully submerged and the numbers 687 cut diagonally by the waterline. It's singing to me. Creaking metal upon metal above me, a lower moaning from below. Wavelets nudging a log rhythmically against the deck. A trickle, a scratching from the stern. I catch myself thinking too much about the canted world beneath me, the microcosmic darkness, and so reach for the hatch. It swings open with surprising ease.

Vague light extends two or three feet along an iron ladder that's been twisted into tendrils. I test it before giving it my full weight and then descend, more outward than down. Take my first breath of tainted air. It is a sweet smell, not the horrifying stench of earthly decay nor the putrefaction of fish. It's sweet, like mola.s.ses, and I decide to do without the handkerchief, pulling myself several more rungs into the hold and trying to judge the distance to the opaque glistening surface below. Then take a second breath and a third. Pause to tell myself that this is not a tomb. And wonder if it is only my imagination that the interior water level seems so far beneath the surface of the river. I try tapping the bulkhead with my knuckles, but it tells me nothing.

While my eyes adjust to the gloom, I try to orient myself to a world thrown askew. The barge's port side will be the deck when I drop; the keel will be starboard; the man I am after will have been washed to the stern with other loose cargo. With a bit of luck I can be out in five minutes. Why do I hesitate? I hear flycatchers outside, the faraway grunting of crocodiles, even some human speech wafting across the water. Inside there is only a tiny trickle of bubbles coming from the submerged engine compartment. So why do I hesitate?

I ease myself over the handrail, hold my breath, and drop. It's only a foot and a half before I hit metal, but the shock is multiplied by a thunderous doom and the subtle slant of the floor. The sharp pain comes first, a burning that tells me one ankle has been sliced by something I can't see. I go sprawling, sliding into oily water, taking in great gulps as I struggle for air and stability. I'm afraid I'll take hold of the sharp thing, but my arms are working automatically, my hands grasping for anything, legs pumping. I'm like a man trying to climb a slippery bank, not able to swim, not able to stand, only floundering ridiculously while his energy gives out. Finally I fall back s.h.i.+vering with the realization that I've swallowed a quant.i.ty of what I'm lying in. Water that is no longer water.

I think to myself I'm going to die for a pouch full of diamonds, and who says that G.o.d does not have a sense of humor? With that calm realization, I find that I can stand, the water being no more than ten inches deep. It moves. I've given life to dozens of floating objects: a carpenter's saw with its black blade just under the surface, a wooden crate, two ebony masks, bits of plastic, a red and white gasoline drum, a child's toy boat perfectly upright and undamaged. And much nearer, almost at my feet, a gray, wrinkled hand. It's a peculiar, dizzying view that I take in, like looking down from a cloud. Things are crooked, canted, static, fluid. There's no horror now; I see a world with its own beauty-a soft coating of silt on the inner hull, a chemical sheen rising and falling with the ripples. I wade farther back into the darkness with no fear, looking for the man she described.

There's no need to search. The barge is as suddenly familiar as my own house. They are cl.u.s.tered near the stern hatch and frozen in grotesque postures. Two of them clutched in each other's arms like lovers, curious, twisted expressions on their faces. The next one lying with his face in the water, head bobbing quaintly because of the wavelets I've made. The others are tumbled together in an indistinguishable ma.s.s, their faces also gray and bloated. Nine of them in all. I wade toward them, sorting by size and shape, recalling the clues she'd given me: the armband, the sh.e.l.l necklace, the shoulder tattoo. In the end, though, he is the one who finds me. Something soft that caresses my calf, inviting me to stay a moment longer.

I do not jerk away but rather stoop to his level, contemplating his rest, raising the arm enough to see that scavengers have begun their work without human protest or hollow emotion. He's simply sleeping, and I work my way back along the body until I come to the ankle. There, just as she has said, is a leather pouch.

Now I am outside, again contemplating my socks, cupping a leather pouch, its irregular shape the only evidence I need of my visit. I am sitting next to my crusted socks, dry, stiff shapes next to the pilothouse, dark liquid draining away from me in rivulets. A metallic taste in my mouth. The distance and detachment of the descent are leaving me, and now my hands are shaking as I draw open the bag. I hold it close to my stomach so they will not spill over the deck, and pour. Finally I understand.

There is one shape only, and I rotate it in my hand, tiny droplets of water sparkling in the late morning sun. Beautiful, exquisite in workmans.h.i.+p, the variations in wood perfectly matching its true colors in the wild. It is a small fetish, one of the handsomely carved figurines from the central highlands, fine grained and alive, though strangely silent. An okapi.

We never saw her again. Brawley searched throughout the Old Quarter for days, then in the market and in the hotels along the Boulevard de 30 Juin. In the Cite. The shantytown. Everywhere there'd been glimpses and rumors. A beggar told me that he had seen her giving out coins, a beautiful, fair-skinned woman with green eyes from the north. And some of the children swore they'd got food from her while she'd been wrapped in rags and smiles, a fat grandmother with a basket of sweets. A prost.i.tute. The wife of an emir. A spirit-bird. A cool breeze for an old man closing his eyes for the last time. They were certain, all of them.

After several weeks Brawley followed her-upriver-on one of the pusher tugs that promised to go beyond Kisangani. I waved as they went churning toward midchannel, and he waved from the stern. For a long time I watched him through the binoculars, strutting and squawking among the crew, drinking from a brown bottle and bending at the waist, choking, gagging, laughing, triumphantly strangled and hugely satisfied with himself. Like one of the parrots outside of Auguste Verloc's cafe.

In the Picking Room.

1.

Okay, here's my baseball fantasy.

I'm somewhere in that dry wasteland between first and second when I look up, and what do I see? On the far horizon I see a silhouette that might be the third base coach on a trampoline, already four feet in the air, knees almost touching his chin, and cranking one arm like a wild man. Which tells me I can make it even though baserunning is not my skill. Because in real life? I am too slow, too heavy, just too d.a.m.n big for anything. But on this particular night, with the stadium lights like Hollywood, it's going to be different. So I round second, pus.h.i.+ng off from that bag like it was the end of the earth. Chugging for third. And about halfway there, I fling myself into the atmosphere, flying like a bulldozer dropped out of a cargo plane because I'm a h.e.l.l of a big guy, and I get maybe one gulp of free air before I'm plowing into that powdery earth so hard that it cuts a trench under the glove. I mean throwing dirt like a meteorite striking the desert. And I slide, man, I slide until that left toe touches canvas at precisely zero miles an hour. Like a ballerina, Jack. And there he is. Blue is looking down on me like Sweet Jesus, dripping sweat and fanning air with both arms, telling the world I'm as safe as a baby in its crib, yes sir. While the crowd goes wild.

And I know that's not much. But I don't have much. And it's the best I've got on most days because we live in a crumbling world and if I blink just once I'm back in the picking room. Picking cloth. I'll be holding one hand like this, getting ready to whack the dust off my uniform, and then there he'll be, Pardue or maybe Murtaugh, swinging around the end of the aisle, saying, "... the h.e.l.l are you doing now, you moron?" And then I guess the crowd goes pretty quiet.

Because in the real world they don't use binners and pickers anymore. The textile mills are failing, and the jobs are leaving for Pakistan, and there's nothing on the horizon but scaffolding and empty bins. And maybe somebody yelling out over the floor, "Hey, y'all! Riggs is in Las Vegas. Doing his act."

That's what'll make them laugh.

2.

On the day they fired Kutschenko I was a binner, slow as an ox but steady enough to know I would last as long as Murtaugh. If the layoffs didn't get me first. It was a simple job. You pushed a dolly of cloth into the picking room, found an aisle with vacant bins, and stacked the rolls-aisle 13, row 6, bin D-the boom echoing every time a roll landed. It was like heaving bodies into the sea. Lift and toss, lift and toss until the paper-shrouded rolls had disappeared into the deep. Then going back for the next load. Eight to ten times an hour. Because the aisles of the picking room were too narrow for a forklift.

So here is the point. One roll of hard-finished denim, papered and spooled, weighs seventy-five pounds. Ten rolls weigh a minute and a half. A hundred rolls weigh a lifetime. So that after six weeks your shoulders and arms were like steel. After a year you were Murtaugh. It's why we earned what we did. They gave us money, and we gave them that hideous strength until we were somebody else. n.o.body lasted. Everybody was on the road to somewhere else. A binner is a machine that looks like a man.

So it was like six months before I mentioned it. At lunch, you know, laying back on a stack of boxes, Willie T. and Pardue rolling up their hot dog wrappers and shooting free throws, Murtaugh smoking one after another, and Kutschenko saying, "... the h.e.l.l you doing in that notebook all the time, huh? You look like an ape readin' a match-book."

"I'm working on material," I said.

"He's working on material," Pardue said.

"What kinna material?"

"What kinna material you working on, kid?"

"Ideas."

"He's working on idea material."

"Will you shut the f.u.c.k up. What kinna ideas you working on? Like science ideas or like a novel or something?"

"I don't know, I'm just thinking about giving it a shot, you know, doing a little stand-up. Sometime."

"You mean like comedy?"

"Yeah, like comedy." Which is what got the big laugh.

"Hey, you got a great start already, kid. All people talk about is how your head is bigger than a mule's. Lissen, you gotta have college for that. I mean, you can be funny looking, but that ain't funny, you know what I'm saying? You want to write funny, then you got to have the college."

"I don't know...."

"Like whatta you got right now, right there on the page?"

"It's just an idea. It's not really a routine."

"We'll tell you if it's a routine or not."

"Yeah, we'll tell you. Is it a routine, or what?"

"It's just a note," I said. "It's not a routine."

"He's got nothing," said Pardue. "He's working on a science book. I knew it. He's a scientist."

"You don't know," said Willie T. "It could be a routine or something. Let's hear it, boy. Play your note."

"Okay. Okay, here goes. Like, I was just thinking ... did you ever notice how on television they advertise drugs that you don't even know what they're for?"

"Heartburn," suggested Pardue. "You got your heartburn, and you got your cholesterol."

"Cut it out, give him a chance."

"No, I'm talking about when some announcer says like, 'Ask you doctor about Th.o.r.exynol,' and then, bam, your Th.o.r.exynol theme music will start up and your Th.o.r.exynol theme couple will go walking on the beach and there you are wondering what just got cured. They do that all the time now."

"That's not funny, kid."

"I know it's not funny, you dumba.s.s. It's got to be part of a routine, which I already told you I don't have. What you do is work it into a doctor bit, see, like you go to the doctor's office with a broken arm or, you know, impotence or poison ivy or something and ask the doc for some of that Th.o.r.exynol because that's what the ad told you to do. Right? When it's really for constipation."

"If it's really for constipation, then what you puttin' it on poison ivy for?"

"How about I kick your a.s.s because you look like a dwarf?"

"I'm just saying. We think you need some new material."

"Hey, kid," said Pardue. "Did you ever notice that you suck? That's what you ought to notice. That funny stuff happens to you all the time and then you tell it and it turns to c.r.a.pola? Did you ever notice that?"

Which is when Meek appeared. Holding the clipboard down below his waist, with the white envelope stuffed in his s.h.i.+rt pocket. Striped tie, short sleeves, beeper clipped to his belt. Everyone knew what it meant. I remembered at that moment nights around our kitchen table with my mother talking about World War II, how the guy from Western Union would bicycle right to your house with his satchel and take out the envelope as he was walking to your door. Everybody knew what that meant too. Except back then we were winning the war.

We knew before he even stepped out of the elevator. All of us looking up when the hoist light came on and the pulley started humming, because no one ever rode the elevator into the picking room. It was a one-way drop, like the caged descent into a coal mine, and you used it twice a day-once going in and once coming out. When the doors finally opened, we saw that it was Meek. The personnel guy. He looked like a child, alone, on a very broad stage, and he waited until the steel doors and the safety gate locked before stepping across the crack. We thought he was a b.a.s.t.a.r.d, I suppose, because it never occurred to us that he was simply afraid. When he got to us, he spoke in a low, mournful voice that we all recognized as fake. "Burkhard," he said softly, "could I speak with you? Down in my office?"

"f.u.c.k no," said Kutschenko. "Do it right here. If you're going to do it, you little maggot, you can at least be a man about it. Do it right now."

And that's the funny thing. The paper in the envelope really was pink.

3.

The picking room was like a library where the pickers went their dark routes pulling scrolls of cloth from the bins and dropping them into boxes bound for other mills. We sent out boxes by the ton. It's the way they measured us, not by the miles we walked but by the tons we lifted, until the numbers 12/25/E became only the rough coordinates of a seventy-five-pound roll of denim buried under twenty others just like it, headed for China, where it would get its real ident.i.ty. Then get s.h.i.+pped back to this country as something by Levi, Wrangler, Arizona, Tommy, Ralph, Calvin. Who the h.e.l.l knew?

It's hard to imagine. A picking room is not like anything else. Not like a warehouse or an aircraft hangar or a cavern. It's just different. I used to tell people to try to imagine a castle or, anyway, something that's old and big like a cathedral, ruined and rebuilt over the years and then one day gutted so that all that remains is a hollow sh.e.l.l and not any kind of building that can be reasoned with. Just an outer wall circling back on itself like some kind of shape a kid would make with building blocks. Then fill that shape with shelves. Miles and miles of them. That's your picking room. So that some sections of the outer wall might look like a ruined temple, like any stiff wind could blow it away particle by particle. Then in other places you might find a master mason's work, delicate art woven in stone. Nothing surprised you after a while. There were bricked-up doors and windows all along the walls. Alcoves, arches, and columns. A forty-foot section of floor where iron rails pierced the brick and then simply stopped beside a nonexistent loading dock. There were squat tunnels done in yellow ceramic tile like the subway, with the same black vacancy at the extremities.

It was a huge and haunted place, more like a morgue than a library. You matched your ticket numbers to the little tags hanging on every roll of cloth; then you pulled your roll out of the bin, cradling it like a child for a moment before dropping it into its s.h.i.+pping box, always an avalanche of dust and grime falling in your face from the dark upper bins, the paper ripping on extrusions, the cloth unraveling like torn curtains. Until after a while you could convince yourself that they really were bodies, crumbling mummies stacked in open crypts like those war atrocities.

And then I try to imagine a man like Murtaugh inside that same place for twenty years.

He was the one guy who lasted, and he looked like the fifties never ended. Every day he wore a white cotton T-s.h.i.+rt, jeans, and biker boots-a uniform so unvarying that I accepted it as normal after a few weeks. The hair he kept in a disciplined flattop. His eyes were pale blue pools of no particular depth. And his immense size was, in a sense, the only shape that stayed in your mind. Pardue told me that he had once served time for killing a man with a logging chain. "Don't mess with him," he said. And I did not. Murtaugh kept a Zippo lighter in his hip pocket that he flipped open with a single snap of his fingers, and he held his cigarette cupped, like this, against some imaginary hurricane. On weekends we did not visit him in the green boardinghouse on Broad Street, and on nights when they needed some overtime we did not volunteer to stay behind with him. Even during the regular s.h.i.+ft, Murtaugh would sort through the packing slips, selecting orders that would take him to the farthest aisles, down the long tunnels, and out beyond the ordered bins where the only lights were hanging bulbs. On some nights we did not see him at the elevator drop at all.

4.

Every once in a while Pardue would go off on Meek, about how he needed to be killed or at least thrown through one of the walled-up windows. "They're doing layoffs again," he would say. "And I think that a.s.shole enjoys it. He needs killing. Did you ever notice that the personnel guy is the last one laid off?"

"I don't think he enjoys it," I said. "I think he's just doing his job."

"I'll tell you what he enjoys. He enjoys porking that little gal in the commissary what you been going out with, name of Patty. I hear he's been spending a lot of time down there."

I didn't say anything.

"Don't nothing rile you up, kid? You need to stomp that son of a b.i.t.c.h into the ground."

"Patty's not that kind of girl."

"Forget Patty! You need to kill that b.a.s.t.a.r.d. I'll tell you what you need."

"What do I need?"

"You need somebody ... from West Virginia. You need a dynamite man."

"I need a dynamite man?"

"You need somebody from West Virginia, son, the Explosives State, where they mix gunpowder in your grits and a cook-off don't have nothing to do with the Pillsbury Doughboy."

"I guess you might know somebody."

"I am from West Virginia, boy. We got dental hygienists up there who use Primacord instead of dental floss, and when you hear a highspeed drill it don't mean your wisdom teeth are coming out, Jack. It means the whole d.a.m.n side of your mountain is about to lift and slide, that's what it means. h.e.l.l, back home we got twelve-year-old boys can blow the wax out of your ears and not even wake you up during the sermon. In fact, you don't even need me. You don't need no dynamite man. You need a twelve-year-old. From back home. In West By G.o.d Virginia."

"I don't know," I said. "Maybe I don't need anybody who's from a state that's just a chopped-off part of another state."