Strange Trades (13 page)

During the mid-eighties, I frequently ate in the McDonald’s in Union Square where Howie dined. But when the street people launched into their Tourette’s-like spew, I always moved away.

Who knows where I’d be today if I had paid closer, more sympathetic attention to their rants?

Conspiracy of Noise

1.

The facts are extremely complicated.

—Mehmet Ali Agca

The police were singing. sting’s dulcetly str dent voice wailed over and over, above the dissonant guitars:

Too much information, runnin’ through my brain,

Too much information, drivin’ me insane—

Suddenly the music stopped.

Howie looked up.

Mr. Wargrave stood beside Howie’s desk. He had obviously reached down to Howie’s Walkman while Howie’s eyes had bee closed, and switched off the tape player. Now Mr. Wargrave waited—patiently, coolly, as imperturbably as an Easter Island statue—for Howie to give him his full attention.

Howie carefully removed his headphones and laid them down on his desk. At one point in the headgear’s descending arc, the burnished metal strap reflected the harsh fluorescent office light directly into Mr. Wargrave’s eyes. The man did not blink. From the corner of the desk, Howie slowly lifted his red-sneakered feet and planted them firmly on the plastic runner beneath his swivel chair.

Two weeks ago, Mr. Wargrave had still had the capacity to frighten Howie. The huge man, in his perpetually unwrinkled, knife-edged suit—every pinstripe of which seemed etched by laser—struck Howie at first as the archetypical Tyrannical Boss, a figure who would rule the office with shouts and humiliating put-downs. Mr. Wargrave’s knobby shaven skull and granitic gargoyle’s face did little to inspire confidence in his human kindness, either.

But during the fortnight since Howie had been hired by The United Illuminating Company, he had come to lose the natural wariness and alarm, the chill feeling under his armpits and below his belt, that he had initially felt whenever his boss walked stiffly through the office. For one thing, Mr. Wargrave’s rather alarming features never changed. Such deadpan features might still have been frightening, had their possessor ever raised his voice or used his physical bulk to threaten. But Mr. Wargrave had done none of these things. Quite to the contrary, he kept his voice low and his body language minimally intrusive. Whenever he had talked to one of Howie’s fellow workers, in fact, he had always spoken so softly that Howie—no matter how he strained— had never been able to overhear what was being said.

So after about ten workdays, Howie had lost all his natural suspicion of Mr. Wargrave.

Contributing to Howie’s insouciance around his superior was boredom: an immense, almost unbearable, nearly physical boredom.

Howie had been hired as a messenger. One day he had noticed a placard propped in the lobby window of a nondescript building he passed every morning after exiting the subway stop, on his way to hang out in Union Square. At first, confused by the smudges on the window glass and the distressed nature of the sign, Howie thought the faded card read:

MESS DESIRED

A WAR

W ILL COME

SECOND FLOOR

Eventually, though, by puzzling out the barely legible missing letters, Howie discerned, he thought, the true message, which was:

MESSENGER DESIRED

APPLY WARGRAVE

WALK UP TO THE UNITED ILLUMINATING COMPANY

SECOND FLOOR

Until that minute, Howie had had no intention of applying for any job whatsoever. He enjoyed being an aimless layabout too much. But something about the dual message hidden in the placard intrigued him, and he resolved to at least go up and find out what it was all about.

On the second floor of the building, Howie inquired of a receptionist about the position. After a short wait he was led to the office of Mr. Wargrave. There the strange man, seated behind a big desk whose top bore a confusing array of papers, had simply looked him up and down before softly announcing, “You’re hired.”

“Hey, wait a minute,” Howie had protested, faintly alarmed. “I never said anything about—”

“The job entails a weekly salary of $750.”

“Okay,” said Howie. “When do I start?”

Howie had shown up for work that first day dressed like all the other messengers he had ever seen rushing about the city on bikes or afoot. A nice absorbent cotton shirt in anticipation of working up a sweat; loose green military pants with about two dozen pockets, the cuffs of which were tucked into white socks; and a pair of high-topped Pro-Keds. At his belt hung a Walkman, headphones draped around his neck.

The receptionist—a pretty young blonde woman—conducted Howie into a big open room scattered with desks and lit with unrelenting fluorescent fixtures. At the desks sat a variety of people, shuffling crazily through heaps of papers mainly, although a few worked at terminals. This space—along with the receptionist’s anteroom and Mr. Wargrave’s office—seemed to comprise the whole physical structure of The United Illuminating Company.

Seated at an empty desk that was announced to be his permanent station, Howie waited for his first assignment.

He spent the first couple of hours looking around the office, watching the assorted men and women work at their incomprehensible tasks. Telephones rang, typewriters and printers clattered, and people whispered among themselves, ignoring Howie.

When watching grew tiresome, he donned his headphones and listened to music.

By lunchtime no one had yet approached him with a task.

Thoughts of $750 a week helped him get through the afternoon.

The next day was the same. Howie tried engaging his coworkers in conversation, wandering over to their areas. They replied in monosyllables and returned to their secretive chores.

On Friday, when handed his paycheck by the receptionist, Howie opened his mouth to quit, saw the printed figures on the piece of paper, and changed his mind.

The second week seemed two years long.

Something kept Howie hanging in there.

And so now, in the afternoon of the first day of his third week at The United Illuminating Company, with Mr. Wargrave standing noncommittally by his desk, Howie was ready for anything, and not the least bit ashamed of having been caught with his feet up, dreaming to the music of the Police.

He was ready to be fired.

He was ready to quit.

He was ready to work.

It turned out to be work.

Having gained Howie’s full attention, Mr. Wargrave reached inside his precisely buttoned jacket and extracted a slim envelope. He offered it to Howie in an extended hand. Then he spoke, in his voice like the slither of silk over skin.

“Mr. Piper, you will deliver this message to the address indicated. You must ensure that it reaches the person named hereon at exactly 11:00 a.m. I trust that you wear a watch.”

Howie was too dumbfounded at Mr. Wargrave’s calm assumption that keeping an employee in the dark for two weeks was normal procedure to protest or ask any of the hundred questions that were on his mind. Instead, he merely replied, “Uh, yeah, sure, I got a watch.”

“Very good. We will now synchronize our timepieces. At the mark, I have 10:17.… Mark.”

Howie adjusted his watch, which was slow.

“One last thing,” said Mr. Wargrave. “You will take Mr. Herringbone with you on this mission.”

“Okay. Who the hell is he?”

Mr. Wargrave indicated with an economical gesture a man seated across the room. “There.” With this he left.

Howie watched his boss walk off. He sat amazed for a moment. Then he rose and went to the fellow who had been pointed out.

Mr. Herringbone sat flanked by six terminals. Three were large IBM models, and atop these sat various smaller ones from other makers. All these active screens cast an unearthly glow on the man’s pinched features, which nestled compactly beneath a chaotic mop of red hair.

To,” said Howie, “how are you, man? My name’s Howie; what’s yours?”

Herringbone raised his eyes from the screens to Howie’s face. His fingers ceased their activity on the keyboards. He spoke.

“Gentle tellings die blue greasy up ten dales.”

“Huh?”

Herringbone sighed and reached into a shirt pocket, coming up with a business card. Howie took it. He was so confused that at first he couldn’t focus on it, and thought he saw the phrase: I FEAR A WAR ON BRAINS. Looking more closely, Howie saw that the card really said:

EUGENE HERRINGBONE

THE UNITED ILLUMINATING COMPANY

I SUFFER FROM

A LESION IN THE

WERNICKE’S AREA

OF MY BRAIN

AND CAN SPEAK ONLY GIBBERISH

Howie tried to hand the card back, but Herringbone motioned that he should keep it.

“Wow,” said Howie. “That’s really weird. Sorry to hear it, Eugene.” The man’s name, Howie felt, didn’t fit him somehow, and so Howie, contemplating their work together, asked, “Can I call you Red?”

Herringbone nodded yes.

“Okay, Red, listen up. The big man says we have to deliver a message together. And we’re really gonna have to move, ’cause the address is way uptown, and we can’t be late. So let’s go.”

Standing up, Herringbone revealed himself to be a neurasthenic individual whose motley clothes fit him like a scarecrow’s.

Stuffing the envelope in one of his many pockets, Howie said, “Hey, Red, since we can’t really talk, I hope you don’t mind if I listen to some music.”

Herringbone shook his head no.

It seemed he had plenty to occupy his thoughts.

2.

Rock and roll is the Esperanto of the global village.

— Samuel Freedman

The Hooters were droning “All You Zombies” into Howie’s ears when the train pulled into the station.

Herringbone had to lay a sinewy hand on Howie’s shoulder to drag him out of the music. Howie came out of his fugue reluctantly. There was something mesmerizing about pop music that could often suck Howie down into bottomless depths. He felt truly in touch with some altered state of existence when he had his ’phones on, as if he were tuning in to some indecipherable but vital message traveling the shared neural system of all humanity.

He could never say, upon returning to this world, what the import was of what he had been hearing.

But still, he knew some hidden information lay just beneath the music’s surface.

Howie doffed his headphones and stood in the swaying car. Outside the graffiti-smeared windows, the platform columns rushed by in a blur, as though the train were standing still and the whole world accelerating.

Herringbone unfolded his lanky self, too. Howie told him above the roar, “Thanks, man, I would’ve gone right by, I guess. IH put in a good word for you with old Wargrave.”

The screech of the brakes swallowed up Herringbone’s reply, which was probably just as well, since the part Howie could make out sounded like “green breast calls duck potato.”

Looking around the car for a few seconds before the doors opened, Howie noticed something.

Everyone in the train was getting an information fix.

There were people reading newspapers: the
Times
, the
News
, the
Post
, the
Dreck
, the
Blurb
, the
Smash
. There were others reading hardcovers and paperbacks and comics. Others studied the overhead advertisements: EAT, DRINK, TASTE, BUY, SELL, LEARN, SEE, GO, DRIVE, HEAR, SMELL, FEEL. Businessmen and -women examined the contents of their briefcases. In short, there wasn’t a person present not processing data in some way.

It all looked very weird suddenly to Howie.

The doors juddered open, and Howie followed Herringbone out.

Howie missed the station number in the hustle, but if this were indeed the correct stop, he knew roughly where they should be, according to the address on the envelope. And when they got aboveground, every last scent and sound and sight proved him right.

They had come up in the middle of Harlem, where the cross streets sported triple digits, and the air was funky with music and poverty, and the bars were so tough they didn’t even have names.

After orienting himself, Howie said, “Okay, Red, I believe we got to go three blocks or so east. Let’s move. It’s a quarter to eleven.”

They set out.

At the first intersection, traffic flowed to block their path, so they waited for the light to change. When it did, Howie noticed the walk sign. It was malfunctioning, and said:

DONT WALK WALK

The one at the next crossing was defective too. This one said: