“Some people?” Robin asked, rhetorically.
“She’s actually very nice,” said Laura.
“Not a big career planned in rocket science,” said Robin, with a forced smile.
“She’s a lawyer, Robin, how dumb can you be?”
“In this case, very.”
I was relieved when Laura decided to drop it. Amanda seemed even more uncomfortable than me with the turn of the conversation. Bickering, especially between adults, always makes me tense. I feel like I’m back in the office, struggling to restrain the human compulsion to rend and eviscerate each other. Or back in the dining room with my father glaring down the long table, trying to bait a reaction out of me so he’d have someone to contend with, someone to put up a little resistance against his relentless fury. It always makes me want to be somewhere else.
“I gotta hit the head,” I said to the group. I gave Amanda’s hand a final squeeze and stood up. I wove my way through the mass of clubgoers, avoiding collisions and eye contact, passing unnoticed through clusters of friends and sexual prospectors.
The window was wide open in the men’s room, chilling down the sticky urine smell. A rough queue had formed right outside a separate room for the urinals. There was only room in there for two, so I waited my turn. Once inside the room, you had to step up on a short platform to take a leak, which I was halfway through when I heard the door behind me snap shut. I was about to turn to look when somebody shoved me forward into the wall. Piss sprayed off the back of the porcelain and splattered my pant leg.
It wasn’t an accidental shove. It had plenty of real meat on it. I assumed it was the kid I’d sent into the dance floor. My sphincter had already cut me off midstream, so my next thought was to get myself back into my pants. As I zipped, I hunched my shoulders and braced for the kid’s sucker punch.
Instead, a hole opened up in the universe and a piece of heavy artillery poked through. It fired off at point- blank range into the side of my head.
I’d been hit a lot of times as a regular fighter, but I’d never seen stars. I was a little surprised you actually could. They popped in front of my eyes like a fireworks display. I put my forearms in front of my face to block the next blow, which came from the other direction. It ripped off my head and bounced it against the far wall. Then a fist caught me above the belly button, lifting me right off my feet. I ended up on my knees down on the floor. Red fuzz filled up my eyes but I could just make out a pair of black motorcycle boots. I looked up from there into the eyes of the big trained bear that had been hanging around our cars at the beach.
“You don’t know what you’re fuckin’ with,” he said in his clearest trained-bear voice—as dead and hollow as his eyes.
I was trying to think of a way to insult his BMW when one of those black motorcycle boots came up off the floor and caught me under the chin, snapping my mouth shut and sending my head for another spin around the galaxy.
This time the stars were talking. Or maybe it was the voices of the people coming through the door. I didn’t care. I was on my hands and knees watching my blood puddle on the floor. The bear squatted down next to me and patted me on the cheek.
He left after that, I think. I heard him bust through a group of guys clogging the doorway. They said things like, “Hey man, what the fuck?” I didn’t care. I was hoping to see some more colorful stars, though all I got were these wiggly red balls, framed in darkness that closed in on the red until that’s all there was and I went down into this gooey black hole wondering if this is how my old man felt—watching his life drip out onto the floor of a piss- soaked bathroom at the back of the bar.
FOUR
MY OFFICE HAD a sprawling overgrown schefflera that filled the space in front of two huge sheets of plate glass that formed one corner of the room. Right next to the plant was a steel desk Abby bought me soon after we were married. I used to sit on top of the desk cross-legged, yogi style, and talk on the phone. Of the thirty-five- thousand people worldwide in our ten-billion-dollar corporation, I was the only one who did this.
I was sitting there looking through the leaves of the schefflera at a resplendent spring day when a call came in from the chairman of a corporate sub-committee. I’d never heard of it before, but this was nothing new. Big corporations are like gas giants—huge swirling balls of toxic, overheated gas held together by gravity, and controlled by a form of planetary tectonics that forces the entire mass into endless cycles of expansion and collapse. The energy unleashed throws off institutional debris that recombines as tiny sub-spheres of frantic activity. They drift free for a while before getting snagged by the gravitational field and sucked back into the body of the organization. But along the way there was always the danger that one of them would call you on the phone.
“We’re doing a performance audit on your area,” the voice on the other end of line said, or something like it.
“Sounds fine. When you’re done we’ll come over and do one on yours.”
“We’re hoping this can be as undisruptive as possible.”
“That’s good. Because shit like this plays hell with our performance.”
I knew most of the people who ran the company. I’d say hi to them in the halls and occasionally stand in front of the board of directors, priestly looking guys in shiny gray suits and white hair, and tell them how I was looking after our $45-million divisional budget. They never looked all that happy or secure. I guess you can make your own crap to live in even when you earn enough in stock options alone to buy a medium-sized city. I think some of them actually liked me. I was one of the few people in the company who did something tangible, who made things you could touch. I symbolized for them a mythical time when substance was presumably valued over style.
But still, when it all hit, they watched in silence through neutral eyes, their minds preoccupied with portfolio management and grandchildren.
One day two big security guards, black guys I’d greet every morning as I walked through the parking lot, stood and watched me empty out the desk Abby gave me. I left it with the schefflera. It didn’t seem right to break up the set.
They helped me throw the stuff from the desk into a dumpster behind the building. We talked about our kids and the sad decline of the normally aspirated big block V-8 engine.
I thought of them when I came to in Southampton Hospital, watching a huge dark brown and white mass take shape as a Jamaican physician.
“Hey ’der, you know what I’m saying to you?” I heard him say through all the wet glop stuffed inside my brain.
I think I nodded.
“Dat’s a yes? You call dat a yes?”
“Yuff.”
“Oh, so dat’s a yes. I get it.”
His hair was cut close to his scalp and he wore neat gold wire-rim glasses. His face would have been more handsome if it was smaller. The white medical coat stretched impossibly across his shoulders and chest, and a pink button-down Oxford cloth shirt showed at the neck. He had about a half dozen pens and a few evil-looking chrome instruments stuck in his front pocket. He leaned into me and adjusted something attached to the side of my skull. Nausea crept around inside my gut. My head felt like it filled up half the room. There was an IV in my arm. I looked down at it.
“Get it out.”
When I spoke my tongue lit up like a firecracker. I felt a big lump on the side when I moved it around my mouth.
“Can’ do dat now,” he looked down at my chart, “Mr. A-cquillo. You need what’s in dere I’m sure.”
I shook my head.
“No painkillers.”
