Seven Deadly Pleasures (15 page)

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Authors: Michael Aronovitz

BOOK: Seven Deadly Pleasures
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The inlaid shelves, those that had been one of the primary reasons he took the place for such a high monthly, were now bare. They helped form a picture of a clown-giant as if seen from under water, huge balloon-like feet across the bottom, then legs with ruffles at the knees, all pyramiding up the slats like waves until the head was but a dot on the front edge of the top mantle.
The exposed bottoms of the pots hanging off the rack in the kitchen were covered with dots and smears. At first it looked like random, yet somehow organized, paint splatter. From the stove five feet away, however, it was a close-up smiling Bozo, red hair burst to the sides, wide eyes, and a grin that stretched along the bottom frying pans. From the dishwasher at the far edge of the space, then, the nose became a medal hanging around the neck of a hairless clown wearing a chef's hat and flipping red pizzas. In the bathroom, there were clowns riding bicycles on the three sections of mirror, but when the two outer pieces folded out, the reflections joined to make a smiling elephant clown that turned into a frowning hippo clown if the angle was altered a fraction of an inch.
The television was on, its screen painted over in thick strokes that formed a smiling clown with silver dollar blush dots on his cheeks. The inside of the mouth and the eyeballs were not painted in, so the moving images beneath made it seem as if he was communicating with the wall clowns across from him. They wore striped shirts, suspenders, and white flood pants and they were painted on either side of the stereo unit, each with a sledgehammer raised in the ready position. The rest of the collage filled the balance of the wall space, one portrait bleeding into the next. There were clowns with big bow ties and clowns with red smiles. There were clowns with checkered bibs, and clowns that were pouting. There were Fedora hats and police hats, and little British hats, and pirate hats perched on bald heads, and heads with wooly hair sticking out over the ears. There were fat clowns and thin clowns, and clowns with teeth and clowns with mini-trumpets that had little rubber squeeze bulbs on the ends.
He did not recall painting them.
They stared at him and he knew what to do.
He went to the bathroom and got out his beard trimmer. He removed the comb-head attachment. He shaved off his eyebrows and then used his razor to erase the stubble. Then he began to remove the hair above his ears. First, he had white-walls, then a Mohawk, then a burr. He picked up the razor for the second time. When he was finished, he started painting again. They wouldn't even see him coming.
***
The clown strutted down Lancaster Avenue, and when he passed the college kids who spilled out of the Subway sandwich shop, all four of them cheered.
"You da man!" Andy Pressman called. He was a sophomore, philosophy major, buzz cut, wire frames, head shaped like an egg. He was known to cross his legs, click his pen up by his ear, and in the silkiest of tones deconstruct whatever paradigm the professor had just spent a half hour building in seminar. Even his friends admitted that they thought he liked to hear the sound of his own voice too much. Tonight, he was dressed up for the Halloween party as a cowboy. He'd borrowed the Stetson and the brown chaps from a techie in the theater department. He had just eaten two large Italian hoagies. There was going to be grain punch with dry ice in it, and he didn't want to party on an empty stomach.
Mandy Rivers was wearing a black leotard. She had straight strawberry blonde hair, funny teeth, and an ass that had gotten a bit bigger this semester. Too many late nights reading for her Modern American Lit. survey course, and too many jumbo bags of peanut M & M's to get her through. She was wearing cat ears and had drawn whisker lines on her cheeks. She had painted the end of her tiny, upturned nose silver with product from a cheap makeup kit that she picked up at the Acme, and she tried not to think about how badly it itched.
Terry Murphy, the Murph monster, had gone the economical route. He had on a corduroys blazer, jeans, and a cap. He had drawn in a square, black moustache above his lip, and around his waist was a wire stuck through a potato hanging in front of his crotch. On his back there was a sign that read "The Dictator."
Rachel Silverstein surprised them all. Throughout the semester she had always worn baggy army pants, oversized sweatshirts, and dark black eye makeup. Real Emo, for all but a mane of curly brown hair that would have made any female country singer jealous. A lot of kids thought she had an eating disorder. Tonight, she was wearing a nun's habit, a tight halter top, and black hot pants. Skinny yes, but all legs, hips, and muscle. Andy Pressman couldn't take his eyes off her.
Except when the clown strutted by. That got everyone's attention. The four partiers spilled out onto the street to cheer. Mandy held up her bottle of Deerpark spiked with vodka and spilled a bit on her pink ballet slippers. Across Lancaster Avenue a group of suits elbowed each other and laughed out loud, while a woman wearing ear buds, a fanny pack, and a sun visor turned her baby carriage around, squatted, and pointed.
Later, Andy Pressman would tell the police that the dude was born to be a clown. He was made for it. He was lanky and humorous. He was strutting and swaggering. He would take two steps forward, and one step back. He would prance in circles and wave to onlookers. He did the "Farmer-John-Doe-See-Doe" thing with his elbows, yuck, yuck, and made all the exaggerated facial expressions. He had his entire head painted bright white. He had a Charlie Chaplin hat about half the size of his bald crown cocked to one side. There were blue brow-arches painted all the way up to the top of his forehead. He had black liner around his eyes and they made big teardrop shapes at the outer edges. He had a red nose ball that honked when he squeezed it and fake ears that were about nine inches long. He had on a green and red jumpsuit, Christmas colors, with buttons shaped like horseshoes.
And of course, he had that sick executioner's axe. It was humongous, with a five-foot handle and a fourteen-inch blade cut in a half moon. It was covered with crinkled tin foil, as if there was cardboard or something like that underneath, and it had a red ribbon tied around the shank in a big bow.
He was the scary clown, perfect for the Halloween party in the McDonald's next door.
When asked why he followed the clown, Pressman said that he saw something strange. When the dude passed by, Andy noticed that there was a small rip in the tin foil on the blade of the play-axe. But the material underneath the rip was smooth silver, not cardboard brown.
When asked what he saw when the clown entered the McDonald's, Andy Pressman took off his wire-framed glasses and rubbed his eyes too hard. A bit of saliva bubbled at the corners of his mouth. He said that before the doors shut behind the dude, he could hear the screams of children. The scary clown-thing, you know? Then, through the dark windows sectioned off by those three-by-three white borders, he saw the guy raise up the axe and bring it down in a rush. It flashed. It seemed as if he split a white-haired lady straight in two, forehead to crotch. Pressman thought he may have even caught a glimpse of the inside of her head for a second, marbled T-bone steak in a half-shell kind of thing, as she was turned sideways on one leg and the other half fell away into the shadows like a domino. Or maybe it was a trick of the light. It was really hard to see anything with the angle and the glare of the low sun. Then Andy had hustled back to the sandwich shop to dial 911.
His cowboy hat was now behind his head, the rubber band stuck under his Adam's apple. He rubbed his nose on his index finger and then asked the cop if anyone made it.
Officer Scott McMullins went under his cap with his pen and scratched his forehead.
"After we put him down we found four," he said. "Three employees who hid behind a deep fryer, and a six-year-old girl dressed like a fairy godmother. Like you said, son, he was born for this."
He looked down at his notebook in a quick review.
"Is there anything else you saw, son?"
Pressman shrugged.
"Not really. Just a flash of something, like afterimage. I'm waiting for it to fade, but I don't think it ever will."
"What exactly?"
Andy Pressman looked off toward a picture of Ryan Howard in front of a Philly cheese steak on the wall by the restrooms. His usual honey voice was shocked and dull.
"After he did the old lady, I watched through those windows for an extra second before I ran. I saw them all trying to get away. And for a second they didn't look like people anymore. They were bristling all over each other, like bugs when you upend a rock in the woods." He looked Officer McMullins in the eye. "He made me forget all the stuff that we pack on to make ourselves into complicated geniuses. He forced me to revisit the fact that we all urinate like dogs no matter what kind of fancy porcelain we make the bowls out of. He reminded me that we hate for no reason, and shit on each other more often than we pause to offer one of those 'how ya doin's' that we don't really mean."
Pressman got up.
"He tricked my eyes, don't you see? Just for a moment, he made me look at kids and grandparents as if they were a swarming disease."
He walked to the exit and stopped. Talked to the wall.
"Then he erased them, and I'll never forgive myself."
He pushed through the door and the little bell at the top tinkled in a small fanfare that followed his exit into the night.
Passive Passenger
S
he was starting in again, and he was well used to it after all these years. Same old tapes played over and again. It was all because he never got that doctorate. He couldn't finish the thesis, and his mere master's in mechanical engineering translated to thirty years of community college work. The pay had been OK, but they'd raised the boys amongst neighbors who were better off. It was not the way of life Dorothy had pictured when she married the number two ranked student overall, first in the sciences, from Brooklyn's Washington Academy and Technical Institute for Boys. Grainy memories from the black-and-white days before the Beatles. She must have thought he would clean up in government work. He preferred the classroom. When they moved to Broomall Pennsylvania for his assistant professorship at Delaware County Community College, she stopped caring about the ins and outs of Melvin's contributions to society. When he failed to complete the Nova doctoral thesis in 1983, she assigned him the back den by the bathroom as sleeping quarters. Melvin had no real argument for this. She'd backed the wrong pony, and now they were limping toward the finish line in their golden years.
Melvin pulled the damp towel a bit tighter under his bloated paunch. The towel was cranberry red, with flower designs on it. He disliked the towel. It was a cheap, short towel that did not absorb the water well. Seemed to run moisture across the skin, leaving a sheen. Dorothy had picked out the towels. She picked out everything. She demanded to do so, and hated Melvin for the drudgery of the responsibility. She cloaked her hate in a mask of annoyance that boasted only slightly blunter fangs. The mask had dug itself in permanently. Her eyes were shock blue, and red at the edges. Her hair looked like a perm, but had taken on the hard consistency of old steel wool. She was very skinny, and the veins on the back of her hands were raised like gorged bloodworms. She had not aged well. Neither had Melvin. He had a nesting of bags under his eyes, thinning hair falling in limp strands over his ears, and pipe-stem arms.
He had goose bumps. It was cold in the hallway. The wallpaper just above Dorothy's head, in the catty-corner between Brian's old room and the bathroom, was starting to curl down at the top edge. It was an ancient, peach-colored wallpaper with a repeated copy of some Impressionist painting of men with bowler hats, tuxedos, and canes. The decorative scheme put the figures in alternating poses both upside down and right side up. Dorothy's taste for a dizzying show-tune world of ladies and gentlemen. Melvin vaguely remembered helping Dorothy pick out the pattern, some time in the early nineties when Douglas was still in middle school learning to play the clarinet that he would give up soon after (he much preferred smoking pot, listening to The Stone Temple Pilots on volume ten, and masturbating for what seemed like hours on end). Melvin dimly recalled shopping with Dorothy when he had lab books to grade, shopping with a smile at the Wallpaper Plus that sat next to the Dress Barn, next to the Kids Cuts, next to the Blockbuster Video. Back then, Melvin had been good at acting interested in wallpaper, and knowing which designs to keep hesitant about. He knew just how long to play hard to get, and then zone in on Dorothy's real first choice. He knew that she knew he was faking interest, and he had long lost the talent to play that particular clarinet, so to speak. It had been a slow process of intricate, quiet protest to convince Dorothy that their little illusions had truly worn down, but that moral victory led to constant, explosive confrontations. The price for the breath of freedom. And he well knew he would somehow be blamed for this current curling in the corner of the ceiling. This unexpectedly raised up an old, helpless anger in him, and he swallowed it. Dorothy always won those things. She was just too darned fast.
"Move over, Mel. I've got to get in there."
"OK."
"You slept in again."
"I know, but it's the weekend."
"It's almost nine o'clock!" Melvin looked down.
"I know."
"Comb your hair."
Melvin brushed the lock that had fallen across his cheek back over his bald spot. She pushed past, and her voice snapped from behind the door.
"Wipe off the sink after you shave, Melvin. We discussed this."
"OK."
"And call the plumber today. That rattling heater kept me up all night."
"Right!" Melvin entered his room. He hung the towel on the doorknob. He slipped on an old T-shirt, and sagging underwear with rips and tears beneath the band. "Right-O!"
But he would forget. He always forgot. Dot was bound to come home and ask up front if he had gotten it done. Melvin would look up in guilt and surprise. "Gosh, honey. I forgot!" Then she would explode and do it herself. It was an old, familiar routine. Melvin pulled his glasses down to the end of his nose and mimicked Sigmund Freud under his breath.
"It is a vicious cycle of reciprocal punishment that dates so far back we fail to expose its very origin, silly, silly."
He reached into the closet and got out plaid trousers and a wool sweater with tan patches on the elbows.
"Practicalities get in the way," he thought. "They work against the very fabric of creative thought." He stroked his chin. "But we must always make room for greatness, mustn't we?" Melvin turned toward his home computer and his eyes danced with lust. Was it still there? The naughty treasure hidden inside the terminal, was it still there?
Of course it was. It had to be, for Melvin had kept the computer running all night. He hadn't dared shut it down for fear of losing it forever. He approached the dark screen, flipped the dimmer switch to bright, and was greeted by words on a electric green background:
WELCOME TO PASSIVE PASSENGER
"Melvin!"
The voice came from behind his closed door, but he still jerked up and slapped the dimmer button across so to blacken the screen. "Yes, mother?"
"Stop calling me that! I'm your wife, Goddammit!" Melvin stared at the carpet and made no reply.
"I'm going out," she said to the silence. "I'll be back later." Her announcement did not require a response, so there was no hesitation in her footsteps that marched down the hall.
"Go ahead, stay out all day," Melvin said to himself. "Out all day so Mel can play." He slid the dimmer again to bright and the letters surfaced, cat's eyes with black lids. How he had stumbled on PASSIVE PASSENGER was a bit of a mystery, all starting with a website address that he had downloaded onto his flashdrive yesterday before lunch, and subsequently forgotten by dinnertime.
Innocent. That morning he'd signed on for a fellowship offered through the college by the U.S. Navy. The same as last year, the program commissioned two thousand dollars to the candidate most qualified to chart the voice patterns of dolphins. The website was an innocent little orientation page, and the announcement received on his school e-mail was jammed on his already overloaded flashdrive that was slung on his lanyard with his college ID, tucked under his jacket, and out of mind as he shuffled through his daily routine. After classes, he stopped at Kelly's for a chocolate donut with rainbow sprinkles. He flipped through some science magazines at Borders, lost track of time, and wound up back at the house after six.
"Sorry I'm late," he called out at the door, as if it was not standard practice.
"I'm in here," Dot said. She was watching the tail end of the evening news. Melvin stood at the edge of the room.
"Well, I'm home," he said. "Anything for dinner?"
"I already ate."
"Oh. Time just kind of passed by, and—"
"I know."
"Oh."
Melvin still had his coat on. He held his hat in his hands, fidgeted with it, and considered joining his wife in the living room for the nightly ritual in which they viewed the news together and passed it off as communication. He watched his wife watch TV for a moment, the image reflecting off her emotionless face.
"Melvin, either come in or go out. You know it annoys me when you stand—"
"Hey, I know him!"
"What on earth are you talking about?"
"They just said Engine 38, look!" He pointed at the television. It was a firefighter, dirty, tired, and at the conclusion of what seemed a strained interview.
"Here with Captain Hugh McNulty, I'm Marylin Chang for Newswatch."
Melvin took a step farther into the room. "So that's his name, Captain Hugh McNulty! It's his mobile unit that I pick up on my radio scanner. By God, I've heard his voice a thousand times!"
Dot sniffed and rubbed her nose.
"Melvin, why don't you toss all those contraptions into the garbage where they belong? That room of yours is an eyesore."
"But—"
"Melvin, it's a junkyard in there."
His shoulders sagged. He had constructed his radio scanner of parts from an ancient radio, digital clock, and Press-N-Play record player. Yes, it was locked onto one lone frequency. It was true that his electric trains only ran in reverse and he had to concede the fact that the automatic pencil changer couldn't be run on 110 without blowing a fuse. He sighed. Originally, he had built his scanner with the hope of picking up a variety of weather stations, and what he had gotten was Engine 38 of the Philadelphia Fire Department. It was a lot of code words, background sirens, and probable D.O.A.'s.
Suddenly, he remembered the stuff on his flashdrive. He straightened up and cleared his throat. "I'm going to work on my computer." With her eyes, Dot gave the cold permission for him to sneak back to his room.
It's a junkyard in there.
Melvin closed the door and searched for a place to toss his coat amidst the disorder of games and gadgets that were scattered across the room on tabletops and milk crates.
Yes, but it's my junkyard.
Melvin got his last yellow post-it note, found a pen, and wrote the name "Captain Hugh McNulty" on it. He stuck it to the top plate of his radio scanner, the name behind the voice. Then he turned, smiled, and approached his computer. His coat went to the floor, his briefcase to the side. Some things never spoke back at him. He gently pressed on the power to his electric friend and ran two fingers down the screen. It winked on with quiet obedience.
It's my junkyard and here, my little subjects hum and buzz and radiate like music.
With an artist's flair, Melvin inserted his flashdrive. The checkerboard of files came up, but the announcement for the orientation page was missing. Melvin backed out and went online. After a bit of tooling around he found the website and clicked. Then came the sudden pop and coppery smell of overloaded wires.
"Balls," Melvin said. The screen shut down to a rude shade of black. Melvin sighed and reached down for the power strip. He flicked it off and on in quick succession and bolted upright when his computer made a sharp beeping noise he had never heard before. Melvin rested his fingers on the keys, ready to log it off and start over again. But atop a strange green background, words were materializing that had nothing to do with Annapolis and the songs of dolphins.
MCGILLICUTTY / DELSORDO
PROJECT SOKAR
DEAD FILE
PRESS ESCAPE TO CONTINUE
Melvin snatched his fingers off the board. Ryan McGillicutty and Angel Delsordo had not been front page news since the seventies, but they were as much a part of the cultural fabric of the greater Philadelphia area as was Rocky Balboa. They were mobsters who had demanded protection from more than a third of the small downtown businesses back then. It was rumored that by 1982 they had taken control of the plumbers' and electricians' unions as well as the Department of Transportation. But hadn't McGillicutty died of lung cancer back in '87? And wasn't Delsordo serving multiple life sentences at Graterford now? If anything, this was a new generation. Melvin looked over his shoulder, turned back, and read the screen again.
PRESS ESCAPE TO CONTINUE
He stared at it and it stared back. Could they trace this to him through his cookies, or whatever they called those things? Too late, he was already in. And what the Dickens was "Project Sokar" anyway?
PRESS ESCAPE TO CONTINUE
Melvin rubbed his chin thoughtfully. It was in the "dead file," right? How often did people really check back into closed dossiers? He pictured the basement level of a huge warehouse, crammed down there to its dark corners with boxes of old, rotting invoices. It was the same kind of thing, right? Melvin hit the ESCAPE button and new screen winked up. A title page of sorts.
WELCOME TO PASSIVE PASSENGER
"That's interesting," Melvin said. He hit the ESCAPE button again.
INSTRUCTIONS—OPERATOR WILL ENTER HIS
SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER. NEXT, ENTER THE
S.S. # OF SUBJECT AND STRIKE ANY KEY TO
ACTIVATE. OPERATOR WILL THEN JOIN WITH
THE MIND OF THE SUBJECT AS A PASSIVE
PASSENGER FOR THE LAST FIVE MINUTES OF TIME
PASSED. ACTUAL TIME ELAPSED FROM POINT OF
ACTIVATION UNTIL CONCLUSION IS ZERO HOURS,
ZERO MINUTES, AND ZERO SECONDS.
It had to be a gag of some sort. Melvin hit the ESCAPE button again.
O—ENTER SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER
"O" is for "Operator," Melvin said. "OK, what the hell." He entered his own number. He tabbed to the next screen and gasped. Under the bolded words
S—ENTER SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER
(and a space to enter the nine characters) was what seemed the first page of a massive subject-directory; a glossary of names, occupations, and social security numbers. Melvin punched the ESCAPE button again and again, but it seemed an endless sea. Screen after screen, there were thousands, no
hundreds
of thousands loaded into the program.
This was no gag. Melvin scanned the H's and saw that his own name was listed.
Melvin felt a sudden shiver run straight between his shoulder blades. The planets were named after Roman god figures. Pluto was the Roman god of the underworld and "Sokar" was the Egyptian equivalent. "Sokar" must have been Pluto's brother planet located in a different solar system! The offspring of McGillicutty and Delsordo had gone into research and development, for God's sake. They'd reached out and touched someone. Did they really have the money to do such a thing? Melvin supposed that if AIG could go on a week-long junket for four hundred and forty thousand dollars without blinking an eye, anything was possible. Those bastards were selling names. And the payoff? A simple trade. The outworlders got to invade the human of their choice for the sake of study and the mobsters got to learn everybody's secrets. Clearly, the subject would not be aware of the operator's presence so as to insure that "Big Brother" could keep on watching, and Melvin Helitz had caught this tiger right by the tail.

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