So Much for That

They were good friends and all, but it hadn’t been the form for Shep to get all choked up, about anything, so Jackson did him the favor of watching a cyclist ride the wrong way around the park while the guy got himself together.

“Nuts,” said Shep, in hand again. “Between now and Saturday, I’ve got to tell everyone.”

“About the surgery?”

“About the fact that Glynis is sick at all. Nobody knows yet, except you and Carol.”

“You don’t think Glynis should do the honors?”

“Nah. It’s better for everyone if I do it. Especially with her family in Arizona. You know Glynis. She’d probably call up and lean back and let her mother go on for half an hour about how the Mexicans next door have five pickups and don’t separate their recycling. Once her mother had hung herself good, Glynis would call her a racist, so Hetty’d get huffy and offended and say something insulting back. Whoom, in for the kill! ‘Is that so? Well, I just wanted you to know that I have cancer!’ Bang, down with the receiver.”

“I can hear it!” Jackson chuckled. “God, I love her.”

“Yeah. I do, too.”

Nearing Handy Randy, Jackson started to whistle “Greensleeves.”

“You fuck!” Shep exclaimed, though at least Jackson had made him laugh. “I’d finally got rid of it!”

chapter five (#u82e9a611-6ed8-54f8-8f77-9bdbedf84de5)

Shepherd Armstrong Knacker

Merrill Lynch Account Number 934-23F917

January 01, 2005 – January 31, 2005

Net Portfolio Value: $697,352.41

After work, Shep had to swing by and pick up Beryl, who’d called earlier in the week hoping to come up to Elmsford and “hang,” meaning invite herself to dinner. The timing was bad in one way – that is, as the timing of anything was bound to be bad for the indefinite future – and good in another. Since Zach was spending the night in another boy’s rank, cable-strewn bedroom again, Shep could practice delivering the news in person to Beryl. They’d resolved to tell the kids tomorrow, and he wanted to work on the wording. He was still unsure whether to share the prognosis when he hadn’t discussed it with Glynis herself.

“Swing by” was an inaptly carefree expression, since picking up his sister in Chelsea meant crawling from Brooklyn into Manhattan during rush hour. It would never occur to her to take the train. (Were the situation reversed, of course, Beryl would never have offered him a lift, nor would Shep have expected one. But he was resigned to the fact that he gave and his sister took, as if they simply had different jobs. It was Jackson who railed about how his friend was constantly doing favors for people that Shep himself would never demand of others in a million years. But he’d rather the double standard work that way than the other way around.) For that matter, Beryl’s volunteering to take time away from her busy creative schedule to slum with her boring brother meant that she wanted something. Something more than dinner.

Mesothelioma kept frustration with his sister at bay, likewise whatever sense of mourning he might otherwise have felt about Pemba. He had not been lying to Jackson. He didn’t think about it. He thought about one thing and put all his energies into one thing only. Glynis’s cancer facilitated the same laser-like focus that Zach found in computer games, perfectly replacing the driving single-mindedness previously provided by The Afterlife. Merely relinquishing Pemba with nothing to put in its place would have left him lost, fractured, at sea, and for once in his life maybe angry. As it was, he still hewed to a prime directive. He would do anything to make Glynis more comfortable, or to keep her from going to any trouble. He would do anything to save her.

With Beryl coming over, he’d stayed up until 3:00 a.m. the night before assembling a pan of lasagna and washing salad greens. He had never cooked very much or been interested in cooking, but now his interest didn’t matter. He looked up recipes. They suited a man who was constitutionally obedient, and he followed them to the letter.

Because for now there was nothing left to contemplate that served the prime directive – he’d already read a dozen Web pages on how best to prepare Glynis for surgery in two weeks’ time – while eking over the Brooklyn Bridge Shep allowed his mind to slide to Jackson and his goofball book. Even Jackson didn’t believe he’d ever write it. After all, he was one of these guys who were remarkably lucid in conversation, but who seized up at keyboards. It was weird how some people could be so garrulous and articulate when blah-blah-blahing down the street, yet couldn’t write a meaningful sentence to save their lives. Their reasoning went spastic, their vocabularies shrank to “cat” and “go,” and they couldn’t tell a coherent story of a trip to the mailbox. That was Jackson. This afternoon, he’d liked that idea of a title on a pile of blank pages because titles were all he was good at. Still, CHUMPS: How Behind Our Backs a Bunch of Bums and Bamboozlers Turned America into a Country Where We Can’t Do Anything or Earn Anything or Say Anything When It Used to Be a Damned Nice Place to Live – well, at titles he was very good indeed.

As for his friend’s half-baked theories, Shep had never been sure whether he himself bought into them even slightly. (It was difficult to attach these views to a political party, since Jackson thought not voting was a political party.) They went something like this: Americans were divided between folks who played by the rules and folks who simply played the rules (or ignored them altogether). Jackson spoke of one “half” leeching off the other for ease of reference, but allowed that the proportions were likely far more dire; the fraction of the population that was being soaked by the savvier sorts who knew the ropes may have been closer to a third, or a quarter. Over the years, Jackson had christened these two classes with a series of homespun shorthands whose children’s-book alliteration Shep remembered with affection: Patsies and Parasites. Freeloaders and Fall Guys. Saps and Spongers. Slaves and Skivers. Jackals and Jackasses. Lackeys and Loafers. He’d used Mugs and Mooches for three or four years now; maybe the tags were going to stick.

According to Jackson, the Mooches comprised first and foremost anyone in government, and anyone who lived off government: contractors, “advisors,” think-tankers, and lobbyists. He reserved special contempt for accountants and lawyers, both of whom slyly implied that they were on your side, when this bloated, parasitic caste of interlocutors effectively constituted a penumbral extension of the State, their extortionate fees amounting to more taxes. Other Mooches: welfare recipients, obviously, though Jackson claimed they were the least of the problem, and as much victims as perps. Marathon runners with sprained thumbs on disability. Bankers, who manufactured nothing of value, and whose money-from-money deployed the suspect science of spontaneous generation. On the opposite end of the spectrum: any mastermind who refused to earn any appreciable income – why bother, only to be robbed of fifty cents on the dollar? (Jackson was indignant at having been raised on anti-communist propaganda. When for half the fucking year, he said, you were working full time for the government, your country was communist.) The recipients of inherited wealth, which covered Pogatchnik. Illegal immigrants, who would remain “undocumented” in perpetuity if they knew what was good for them; synonymous with becoming a card-carrying Mug, citizenship as an aspiration was pathetic.

Criminals were Mooches, too, of course. Yet while Jackson scorned establishment Mooches, who concealed their rapacity behind a façade of rectitude, or even, gallingly, of self-sacrifice (the expression “public servant” drove him wild), ordinary decent criminals won only his admiration. Drug dealing, Jackson claimed, was an intelligent, well-considered career path for the average young person, enterprising self-employment sans the Schedule C. He esteemed anyone who worked off the books or serviced a black market. He had a soft spot for Mafia movies, and had seen Goodfellas five times. To Jackson, criminals embodied the seminal American spirit.

As for the Mugs, Jacks cheerfully confessed to his own lifetime membership. They comprised all the remaining schmucks who got with the program, but mostly because they had no guts, and lacked imagination. Mugs exhibited neither resourcefulness nor innovation, ostensibly core traits of the national character. Having never undergone proper adolescent rebellion, Mugs were developmentally retarded, and as grown-ups were still figuratively setting the table and taking out the trash. They may have learned to say “fuck” in front of their fathers, but they could never bring themselves to use the word with the IRS. Even on the five-point scale of moral reasoning (where Jackson had dug that up Shep had no idea, but its exposition had consumed one of their ritual foursome get-togethers last summer), Mugs were stuck at the bottom. For Mugs weren’t motivated by virtue, but by fear. They sweated bullets over their taxes, adding up tattered receipts for $3.49 and $2.67 and getting flustered when the calculator didn’t produce the same result to the penny on a second tally – despite the fact that the recipients of their fervid bookkeeping would blithely drop $349 million through the cracks in the GAO floorboards or fritter $267 billion on a dead-end war in a sandpit, a dizzying shuttle of decimal points that never struck Mugs as unfair or bitterly hilarious. They got their car insurance payments in on time; able to afford only collision, these were the same suckers who’d be T-boned by an uninsured Guatemalan running a solid red light and get stuck with the bill. They didn’t put extensions on their houses without getting a building permit, belying that they really owned their houses to begin with. To the degree that these poor flunkies were not tippy-toeing through their lives abdicating everything they ever worked for out of terror, they were stupid.

But it wasn’t meant to be this way, Jackson insisted. Sneakily, little by little, the Mooches had hijacked a system that hadn’t started out half bad into a situation that would have mortified the founding fathers, who’d never intended to create a monster. Nor did they design democracy as an evangelical religion or a self-destructive export business, whereby it actually cost you money to sell your product abroad. What Thomas Jefferson’s crowd had in mind was a country that left you alone and let you do whatever you fucking well wanted so long as you didn’t hurt anybody – in short, “a cool place to hang out,” and not “this big drag.”

For government was now, in Jackson’s view, a for-profit corporation, although a sort of which the average industrial magnate could only dream: a natural monopoly that could charge whatever it wanted, yet with no obligation to hand over a product of any description in return. A business whose millions of customers had no choice but to buy this mythical product, lest they be locked in a small room with bad food. Since all politicians were by definition “on the tit,” none of them had any motivation to constrain the size of this marvelous corporation that didn’t actually have to make anything. Occasional conservative lip service notwithstanding, sure enough, over the decades USA Inc. had done nothing but expand. Jackson predicted that at some point in the near future the last remaining Mugs would get wise and sign on. Once the entire American populace was either working for or living off the government, the country would shudder to a halt. It was happening in Europe, he said, already. With a ratio of all-Mooch to no-Mug, there’d be no one left to squeeze dry, and presumably they’d all sit around waiting to die, or kill each other.

Shep was reluctant to believe that he got nothing from government. Roads, he’d point out. Bridges. Streetlamps and public parks. Admittedly, this is what Jackson meant by the umbrella term “sidewalks.” The nominal infrastructure required to conduct ordinary life was largely provided by municipal authorities, which commanded such a tiny sliver of the pie that on a plate it would fall over. As Jackson frequently observed, if every citizen threw the same ante into the pot, they could cover all their primitive communal needs with “chump change” – and that was what George Washington had in mind, as opposed to “this obeisance to the king bullshit.”

While Shep enjoyed the game of coming up with another vital service from on high that was worth the price of admission – drug testing, air traffic control – he conceded that citing the palpable benefits that his taxes accrued to him personally was surprisingly difficult. Yet he also felt that the totality of the many agencies that controlled his life still approximated an order. Even a rough, inequitable order, as opposed to the gory havoc of animals running in packs, was priceless.

Besides, even if he accepted Jackson’s cartoonish categories, he’d still rather be a Mug than a Mooch. Someone on whom others depended, a man as he understood the word. Although he believed in an implicit social contract – that you agreed to take care of other people so that when the time came they would take care of you – he didn’t keep up his end of things in order to incur a debt he’d any intention of calling in. He would remain a resource rather than a drain to the end of his days if he could help it, if only because being reliable, self-sufficient, and capable felt good. This big, round, grounded solidity surely beat the thin, tittering tee-hee of putting one over on people. It beat the sneering self-congratulation of a confidence trickster and the huddling sneakiness of a cheat. There was nothing enviable, either, about the resentful gratitude of the beholden. Curiously, although forever ridiculing the gullible stalwart who was responsible, dependable, and steadfast, Jackson had long admired Shep Knacker for embodying these very qualities.

More perplexing still was why Shep’s best friend would lavish so much effort on a paradigm that cast himself as weak, powerless, and craven. It was thanks to Shep’s stipulations on selling Knack – an assurance in writing from Randy Pogatchnik that the workforce manager would get a six-figure salary, replete with an elevator clause – that Jackson made enough money to begrudge the taxes he paid on it, and sometimes Shep wondered if he’d done the man any favors. What was it about his life that made him feel so taken advantage of, so diminished?

Miraculously, Beryl was peering through the window of her lobby, so he wouldn’t have to do circuits of Sixth and Seventh Avenues waiting for her to come down. She bundled into the front seat in nubbled layers of cape, sweaters, and scarves, clunking in jewelry of the rocks-and-feathers school that Glynis detested. Though no thrift-shop confabulation – he suspected that she paid through the nose to look that casually rumpled – Beryl’s faux bohemian dress was typical of a generation that just missed out on the sixties. Although her older brother had almost missed the era himself, Shep encountered enough of its tail end not to be nostalgic about the hippy thing. Now, those guys were Mooches. Always borrowing money, or stealing it, promoting free this and free that, parroting a lot of anticapitalist twaddle only made possible by the hardworking parents they lived off. He was sorry about the boys who died in Vietnam. The rest of it was a crock.

Beryl kissed his cheek and cried, “Shepardo!” the neo-Renaissance nickname from childhood still imbued with a measure of affection. “God, I hope no one sees me in this SUV. You remember I did that film on SUV-IT, the activist group that smashes these things up as a political statement about global warming.”

Were Beryl truly concerned with carbon emissions she’d have volunteered to take the train. “This one’s a Mini Cooper,” he said mildly, “compared to the new ones.”

She asked perfunctorily how he was. He was relieved that she didn’t notice when he declined to say.

“So what are you working on now?” he asked. It was safest to return to the subject of Beryl. She never inquired about what was up at Handy Randy; the assumption ran that nothing was ever up. It was a business, a prejudice against which she had unquestioningly inherited from their father.

“A film on couples who decided not to have kids. Particularly homing in on people in, you know, their mid-forties, right on the cusp of not having any choice. Whether they’re content with their lives, whether they think they’re missing anything, what put them off about having a family. It’s really interesting.”

Shep made a ritual effort to care, but it was harder than usual. “Are most of them resigned, or regretful?”

“Neither, for the most part. They’re perfectly happy!”

As she went into the particulars, Shep reflected that his sister’s body of work might seem incoherent from the outside. The one documentary that she was known for, insofar as she was known at all, was a paean to Berlin, New Hampshire – pronounced Ber-lun, a provincial mangling of its European roots that he’d always found strangely sweet, and hailing from a patriotic disassociation from Germany during World War I. Using interviews with residents of its dwindling population, many of whom used to work for the paper mills that were now nearly all shut down, Beryl’s film Reducing Paperwork had captured something archetypal about New England’s declining postindustrial towns that was reminiscent of Michael Moore without the smirk. It was warm, and he’d liked it. He was truly pleased for her when the hour-long elegy made it into the New York Film Festival. She’d done a quirky documentary on people who don’t have a sense of smell, and a more serious one on graduates saddled with crushing debt from higher education.

But her subject matter only seemed all over the map until you realized that Beryl’s lunatic then-boyfriend was a member of that group that shattered the windshields of SUVs, and that Beryl herself resented cars of any description because she couldn’t afford one. Beryl was in her mid-forties, and Beryl didn’t have children. Like Shep, Beryl grew up in Berlin, New Hampshire. Beryl was born without a sense of smell – rather impairing a full grasp of her signature material, since throughout his boyhood Berlin reeked – and Beryl still hadn’t paid off her student loans. The self-referential nature of his sister’s work reached its apogee when last year she made an independent documentary about independent documentary makers, a project tainted with a whiff of self-pity that involved most of her friends.

In general, the feisty, spunky determination that was driven by inspiration when she was younger had aged into a grimmer, glummer resolve that was driven by spite. She would “show them,” whoever they were, and churning out yet another film project on a shoestring now seemed as much habit as calling. Too old now to be an aspirant, Beryl hadn’t established herself sufficiently to qualify as anything but. Oh, she did get the smell doc on PBS, and she’d won the odd grant from this or that arts council. But the New York Film Festival coup was years ago. The technological advances in compact cameras that enabled her to keep going with minimal funding also meant that plenty of other wannabes could buy the same cameras, and she faced more competition than ever. Maybe he was too conventional, but her hand-to-mouthing it in middle age was starting to look less like a gifted woman sacrificing for her work, and more like failure.

“You give any more thought to participating in a documentary about people who dream about quitting the rat race?” she asked as they sat, stationary, on the West Side Highway. “I was even thinking about calling it something like Belief in the Afterlife.”

He rued having shared the private argot. “Not really.”

“You’d be surprised. It’s a pretty common fantasy.”

“Thanks.”

“I just mean you’ve got company. Like, it’s kind of a club. Though I’ve had a hard time finding anybody who’s actually done it. With the two cases I’ve stumbled across, they both came back. One couple went to South America and the woman practically died; another guy sold everything he had and moved to a Greek island, where he got lonely and bored and didn’t speak the language. None of them lasted more than a year.”

Shep was determined to avoid any entanglement with her projects, which had already cannibalized most of her life and would hungrily move on to her kin. Thank God he’d kept his mouth shut with Beryl about Pemba.

“But anyone you run into,” he observed, “has obviously come back. The people who’ve left for good aren’t here.” It was theoretical for him now, but stuck in this agonizing creep of cars he still wanted The Afterlife to be possible for somebody.

“Hey,” she asked. “You made any new fountains lately?”

A safer subject. Unlike his own family, Beryl thought his fountains were charming.