Apex Hides the Hurt (11 page)

From such a simple assignment, all manner of devilment popped into his head. And of course that’s what Ehko was about, he realized. The little children’s hands would be like giant’s hands, the hands of God, reaching down to the floor of the playroom, building this community and world from interlocking parts, every sure snap sound the affirmation of nature’s logic, or at the very least splendid Swiss design. Revoking order only to affirm it anew the next afternoon. The multicolored pieces spread out on the floor like the spiral arms of a galaxy. Which made him universe-big, and he wondered then, what was this toy, and what was this game?

Eventually he followed the instructions. He felt compelled to. In the end nothing was so pleasing as the image on the cover of the box, and this was a lesson to be learned. The original idea remained in that jumble of bricks, patiently waiting.

The kit was still in his apartment, at the top of the closet. He hadn’t the heart to throw it away.

They hired him to make the tough calls. He returned to them Ehko Village. Which, he had to admit, didn’t seem like a tough call at all. It wouldn’t win any awards. Some people, he knew, would say: Well, you didn’t really name anything at all, we could have done that. They’d be right, but they would have done it for the wrong reasons, he countered. After Ehko Space Station Delta and Ehko Martian Invasion Armada, a trip back to Ehko Village was a bold choice. It did not need to be updated. It did not need to be renamed. We have forgotten, he told his clients, we have forgotten the old ways. And the old ways have a name, and they have a power. Malevolent imaginings might try to force those pieces into something they are not, but the name will force them into the correct and kind configuration. We are too easily unmoored these days, he said, and the name will keep us tethered. Ehko Village said values were constant, that times had changed but an idea of ourselves still remained. There is a way of life we have forgotten that is still important.

He didn’t believe that crap, but that wasn’t important. He knew it would strike a chord. The Village was off to the side and timeless. Driving off the main highway one day you might find it and wile away a few hours savoring it. The very name Ehko, after all, what was it? It was what we knew bounced back at us from the walls of the cave, in diminishing repetitions, until it disappeared and we were alone with a memory. So how to stop that? Ehko Village was a reverberation of America that did not grow faint with time. It was always there to play with us.

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True, “Why don’t you hop in and let me show you something” did sound like a come-on. Regina’s somber mood throughout the last half of dinner, however, smothered the little erotic fantasia percolating in his brain at the sound of those words. As he climbed into the passenger seat, he reminded himself that he had a long-standing rule about sleeping with clients. Then he recalled that actually he had no such rule, but it would certainly complicate things, especially since she was already involved in a torrid psychological ménage with Albie and Lucky. He shuddered. They pulled away from the curb.

She had a way of speaking that reminded him of his mother and her cousins. And he thought: Is that it? Some sort of Oedipal thing churning belowdecks? First the sexy librarian, now this. He was really hitting the sexual fetishes hard today. Tomorrow at the barbecue there will be cheerleaders around every corner, pom-poms locked and loaded. He wondered about the collective noun for a group of French maids. A stocking of French maids? A garter of French maids? Or maybe it wasn’t Oedipal at all. Maybe it was her conviction that he found sexy. He shuddered anew.

“This is all old Winthrop,” Regina said, as they turned off the promenade. They rolled past a string of handsome folk Victorian houses. Close to the center of things and nicely porched and well hedged. What kind of view was there from the top windows? What was there to see? Space. This was the trade-off between the country and the city and he couldn’t help think: What’s the mortgage on that thing? There were rumblings his building might go co-op, so he was attuned.

“This was the white part of town when I was growing up. Me and my girlfriends had this game we used to play when we came by here, where as soon as we got on this street we’d start screaming, ‘They’re gonna get you! They’re gonna get you!’ and run as fast as we could. There were all these old, old people on this street and I guess we found them scary.”

He said, “Yup.”

“Winthrop built the first of these as the factory started to take off, and then he sold them to people who moved here. Once the town got incorporated, it really took off. Merchants started setting up shop, whatnot. Winthrop would sell the houses, and then buy them back, then sell them to new people.”

“That’s some old-school shit.”

“Yeah,” she said, chuckling. “But then the last ten years, Albie has sold it all off bit by bit. There’ll be no buying it back. It’s all Lucky’s now, or the new people. I could point to each one of these houses and say, this used to be Winthrop and that used to be Winthrop, but at this point, I think more of Lucky and the new people than I think of Albie and his family. It hasn’t been that long, but that’s the way it is.”

It must be like selling little pieces of yourself. And what would that do to you? They turned off Elm and onto Virginia. “That’s probably what made him crazy,” he said.

She whistled. “Like I said before, he was always a little off. Like those crazy British princes, the ones that are all nuts from generations of people marrying their cousins. Not that I’m blaming incest or anything. Maybe all royalty is crazy. That’s the price after a while.” Her eyes narrowed. “His wife was the last straw. I liked her. Everybody bad-mouths her, but she was always nice to me. Took everything but Albie’s pants in the divorce, though.”

“I saw his house.”

“So you know. Yeah, he wasn’t right after they split, but he wasn’t that right before they split.” She pointed out the window. “That Queen Anne over there they cut up into apartments for the computer people. Had a stalking complaint there last spring, so I got to see the inside. They did a nice job with it. The appliances.”

They rounded a corner and the homes grew more modest and modern, ranch houses with the occasional two-story wood frame thrown in. “This is still mostly a black part of Winthrop, but a lot of the new people are moving up Reginald Street. Especially lately.”

He looked at the SUVs and Volvos in the driveways and superimposed wagons and hitching posts. Were the Goode and Field patriarchs as real-estate savvy as Winthrop? Did they have the same kind of arrangement with black settlers who came later, like Winthrop had with his laborers and whatnot? He didn’t think it would be a polite question to ask, even if Regina hadn’t appeared to be in some sort of trance. She slowed the car to a crawl and her eyes prowled the fronts of all the houses, looking for something. She said, “You asked me in the restaurant when I changed my mind. I didn’t know I was going to do it until I did it. Until it came time to vote.” Perhaps she was superimposing her own images on what was there now, placing the faces of relatives and old friends. Her dead.

“I started thinking of changing the signs,” she started. “Because you have to change everything, right? The street signs and then the letterhead in the office. And who would pay for it. I thought: It’s Lucky’s baby, so let him pay for it. It’s his, like before it was Winthrop’s. It’s been done before. And—it was a lie. That’s what it is, isn’t it? If I ask you your name and you tell me something other than what it is, that’s a lie. We got to the conference table and I looked at those two men I’ve known my whole life, and I thought: This is wrong.” She turned to face him, her expression fixed. “It should go back to Freedom. That’s its true name.”

They were at the intersection of Reginald and Regina. “Winthrop’s not the only royalty in town, huh?” he said.

“My brother is named Reginald, too. Maybe you’ll meet him and his wife before you leave. Everybody in my family is named after someone who came before. And if we didn’t know them personally, we knew them as a place we traveled on. Funny, huh? You get to the white part of town and they named the streets after the colonies, Virginia and Massachusetts and whatnot. Or trees. My mother used to ask me, ‘What started that whole mess of naming streets after trees? Didn’t they have people they loved?’ That’s how you know what part of town you’re in. Over here, the streets are people. They’re your history, your family. Richards, Nathaniel, Goode. How you know you’re home is when you see your name on the street. And if you get lost, just look for yourself.” She turned right, and he had that heading-home feeling.

Regina didn’t speak for the rest of the ride to the hotel, leaving his eyes to jump from sign to sign. Winthrop’s Virginias and Oaks were well within character for someone hungering after the connotations of the eastern establishment, he decided. Want to import the coast to the prairie? You have to learn how to be just as dull, name by name. Whereas the black settlers had different marketing priorities. Hope crossed Liberty, past the intersection of Salvation. Better than naming the streets after what they knew before they came here. Take Kidnap to the end, make a left on Torture, and keep on ’til you get to Lynch. Follow the lights ’til you get to Genocide and stop at the dead end. Not exactly the kind of stuff that inspired positive word of mouth among prospective neighbors, unless he was so out of the loop that the phrase “We saw the prettiest little bungalow on Rape Street” was now much more upbeat than it used to be.

What would Lucky’s map look like? Take Innovation all the way to Synergy, then hang a looey on Scalability all the way to Cross-Platform. They were almost at the town square, he could feel it. He shook his head: going native. Did it matter in the end what names they gave their roads? There were secret street names, the ones we were unaware of. The ones that only the streets themselves know. Signage vexed Regina, and well it should, he decided. Welcome to Freedom. Welcome to Winthrop. Welcome to New Prospera. Tear the old signs down, put up new ones in their place—it didn’t change the character of the place, did it? It didn’t cover up history. Not for the last time, he wondered what his clients believed they could achieve. And what exactly he was doing here.

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One day he stubbed his toe. In retrospect there was some inevitability tied up in said stubbing, so he came to believe that his toe wanted to be stubbed for reasons that were unknowable. Unnameable.

The C-line apartments in his building were renowned for their spectacular troves of closet space, and as it happened he lived in 15C. Where lesser mortals were forced to retain the services of storage facilities, the C-liners rejoiced in walk-ins that but for a quirk of fate might have been additional bedrooms. He reserved two of those uncanny closets for the numerous boxes sent to him from grateful clients. In the boxes were gifts. Or gratuities, more like it. Little tips.

They were things he had named. On the sides of the boxes the names loitered and slouched, matured by design teams and promotional schemes into adolescents with personalities. To look at the logos, his former charges had grown up to be flamboyantly calligraphic or dourly industrial or irreverently trendy. The standard arguments over nature and nurture applied.

Most of the products were of no use to him. Space-age spatulas, automatic bird feeders, piquant ointments in various strengths—they represented the breadth of the world. One Christmas he sorted through the boxes, gift wrapped certain items, and sent them to loved ones. The response was less than enthusiastic and the next year he returned to gadgets and doodads. The gadgets and doodads, like his clients’ products, remained in their packages, but he was of the mind that when it came to gifts, it was the appearance of thought that counts.

Of all the stuff in his storage closets, the only thing he had time for was Apex. It was hard to argue against the utility of an adhesive bandage and in those early days of Apex, he, like many citizens, found it near impossible to contradict the reasoning of the multicultural bandage, which so efficiently permitted the illusion of a time before the fall. When he stubbed his toe that fateful day, it was toward a box of Apex he hobbled.

He didn’t know what tripped him up. He couldn’t remember after all that happened what he stubbed his toe on. Later he decided the specifics were not important, that the true lesson of accidents is not the how or the why, but the taken-for-granted world they exile you from. In all probability he stumbled over something small and insignificant, as is only appropriate for such a shriveled, gargoyle word like
stub
. He remembered going into the bathroom and reaching for the box of Apex. The box was his color; they had seen him in the office and knew his kind of brown. He sat on the toilet and removed his shoe. There was a little bit of blood on his sock, and when he pulled it away, he was surprised that his toe did not hurt more. Poor little guy! It looked terrible. The toenail tilted up out of a murk of thick blood, cotton lint, and gashed flesh. It could go either way. The nail might do a little knitting-back-together thing and heal, or it might fall off as a scab. He didn’t care. He put on an Apex.

Which toe was it? One of the shy ones, not the big toe, or the middle, but the one next to the pinky. It sat at the back of the class and did its homework, not likely to be voted anything. Never Best this, or Most Likely to that. The brown adhesive bandage was such a perfect tone that it looked as if he’d never had a toenail at all. That he had never stumbled.

Did it hide the hurt? Most assuredly so.

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He was fortunate the next morning that his bed was big enough to accommodate both hemispheres of his hangover. He’d wake up for a few minutes to experience paranoid hangover (these people are out to destroy me), then fall asleep and wake up half an hour later way on the other side of the king-size bed, enduring anxiety hangover (if I weren’t so worthless, these people would not be out to destroy me). He rolled back and forth across the bed, between maladies, disparate throes, for most of the a.m., ruing his decision to partake of the free shots offered by the partying Help Tourists in the hotel bar. He’d intended, after his jaunt with Regina, to get some sleep. Instead, some of the people he’d met with Lucky the previous night had glimpsed him by the elevators and dragged him over. Then he had been enticed with a special shot-glass version of the Winthrop Cocktail. Repeatedly enticed.