The Bialy Pimps (43 page)

Tony sighed, then bent the fiber-optic lens down so that he could get at the wall behind it. He pulled a small hand drill from the bottom of his tackle box and went to work.

After Tony had gone, the Anarchist turned to Tracy and asked, “What will you do when this is all over?”

Tracy shrugged. “Probably write theoretical physics textbooks. Maybe you’ve read my treatise: ‘The Meaning of Life and the Fact That I Know Everything.’”

The Anarchist snorted a laugh. Tracy had been craning over his shoulder for the past year as the Anarchist did his homework during lulls. Tracy would usually scribble something completely incomprehensible on a scrap of paper and shove it forward with authority, declare it to be the answer, and say, “You’re welcome.”

“Seriously,” said the Anarchist.
 

“Why are you thinking about it ending?”

“Everything ends.”

“Not yet, though,” said Tracy.

“Everything ends.”

Tracy had recently cut his pony-tail-length hair to a medium shag and had grown a goatee, which he began scratching. This was more than just a random question. There was something in the Anarchist’s eyes today that hadn’t been there yesterday.
 

“Where is this coming from?” Tracy asked. “With things getting better in here every day, why are you already obsessing over the end instead of enjoying it?”

The Anarchist sighed. “You know how I’m going to grad school after I graduate in the spring?”

Tracy nodded.
 

“Well, I went up for a visit yesterday, all the way up to Cleveland. To look around, sort of interview, stuff like that. I still need to fill out an application, but it’s just a formality for their fellowship department. It’s not to see if I get in. I’m in. They paid for my trip. They bought me lunch at a nice restaurant. The place recruits, like OSU recruits football players, and they want me.”

“Congratulations.”
 

“Thanks. But the thing is, I don’t know if I want to go anymore.”
 

This was surprising. Through the spring and summer, it seemed like all the Anarchist could talk about was how eager he was to get away from the shitty academic environment here. He said that OSU had a firmly established pecking order: sports came first, politics came second, and education came a distant third. And that just as high school basketball coaches get a nothing teaching job like typing or gym to legitimize their status as school coaches, OSU offered classes so that it could legitimize its college football team and collegiate social agenda. The Anarchist had been bitching about how he was tired of being third-tier, and kept saying that he was dying to get the respect that legend said some institutions actually gave to adults who wanted to do something with their lives.

“Really,” said Tracy. “Why?”

“It just suddenly all seems so... boring,” he said. “Nice people up there, but... “ He shook his head. “I don’t know.”
 

Tracy wasn’t sure what his role was supposed to be. He was the Anarchist’s friend, but they didn’t exactly spend long candlelit evenings discussing their feelings.
 

“So... what? You’re not going?”

“I think I
have
to go. It’s what I’ve planned to do since junior high school. What else am I trained for?”

Tracy’s major was English. He wrote poetry and short stories and said he’d “probably get a job with a magazine or something.” The fact that he seemed to have no definite, specific aims was incomprehensible to the Anarchist. What if Tracy couldn’t find a job? Creative fields were so risky and unsure. Shouldn’t he be making connections now, figuring out what those “magazine or something” jobs paid, and if they’d be hiring in a few years? But really, it probably didn’t matter. English was a soft major. You got a degree in English, psychology, or philosophy, and you ended up being an office worker or a truck driver. It wasn’t a major people actually ended up doing anything with. That’s why the Anarchist had gone into science. Stuff you could measure, stuff that had real, legit, commercial applications.

“That may be the saddest thing I’ve ever heard,” said Tracy. “Think for yourself, dude.”
 

“It’s not that simple,” he said.
 

And it wasn’t. The Bingham’s crew was a hodge-podge of personalities and had always been, but a few traits had always been dominant among the employees who’d stayed, who’d fit in, and who’d lasted more than a month or two. They were freaks with fringe interests like obscure music, tattoos, and piercings. They drank, they smoked, and they did a lot of pot. They were all very smart, but not usually academically driven. If any of them reported getting an A in a class, it was cause for surprise. By contrast, the Anarchist didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, and had never done pot. He’d done very well in both high school and college, always turning assignments in completed fully and on time. He didn’t slack, didn’t blow off responsibilities. He’d listened to Top 40 radio for most of his life, and had zilch in the way of body art or modifications. Yet somehow, he fit.

“Yes it is,” said Tracy. “You talk more than anyone here about nonconformity and questioning assumptions. So nonconform already. Question.”

“Tracy, this is what I’ve been planning for my whole life. It’s one thing to talk about nonconformity, but another thing entirely to...”

“... to practice what you preach?”

The Anarchist gave him a look that said,
That’s not fair.

Tracy shrugged. “I don’t know how you live, but I have to listen to my gut. If I was talking about something in the way you’re talking about this, I wouldn’t do it no matter what I’d ‘been planning my entire life.’”

“Maybe grad school isn’t really the wrong choice, though,” said the Anarchist. “Maybe I’m just trying to skirt responsibility. Maybe, at this point in time, given what’s going on around here, I’d rebel at the idea of doing anything that wasn’t... well, whatever this is we’re doing right now. But again, everything ends. We can’t keep being ‘Bialy Pimps’ forever. Is everyone else planning to just... live for today and see what happens? Because I’ve gotta say, it sounds all awesome and Zen to live for today, but then you’re S.O.L. when ‘today’ ends and you’ve got nothing planned for the next step.”

Tracy shrugged.
 

“Things change,” said the Anarchist. “Doesn’t that bother you? How can I ‘live for today’ when I know that everything I’m ‘living for’ is always ending before my eyes?”

“Holy shit are you grim,” said Tracy. “We’re still on the rise. At least wait until things start flagging before you begin planning our funeral.”
 

This time it was the Anarchist who shrugged.

“Look,” said Tracy, looking at him earnestly. “Everything ends so that something else can begin. Each new beginning is the evolution of the past. You can’t stay where you are, and you never should. You should grow. If you worry about endings, then maybe you need more compelling beginnings.”

“I don’t want this to end. I don’t want a later. I want now.”

Tracy, ever the latent philosopher, poured himself a cup of coffee as he continued to muse. “People say that you have to play the cards that life deals to you,” he said, “but I don’t know if I buy that. It’s too fatalistic. If you peek at your hole card and you’re looking at a busted split, I say you don’t have to play that split.”

“So what do you do?” said the Anarchist.

Tracy finished filling his cup of coffee, capped it, and took a sip.
 

“You reshuffle,” he said.

Ted was the tutor. Ted was not Superman.
 

Nothing made sense.

The Ted problem typified the general mood at Bingham’s as fall grew ripe and blossomed. As died the autumn, so died normality. It was as if the seasons were psychically tied to the roots of reason.

Although the general opinion was that Artie had made an error in his Ted discovery, each and every person involved in the long and enigmatic struggle that was coexistence with Army Ted felt deep down that it had to be true. Ted was the tutor. Ted was genuine.

But of course, Ted was not genuine. Every verifiable fact that Ted had told them had been revealed as false. He owned no fancy cars and no fancy boats. He did not live in the lap of luxury. And there was more. Armed with Ted’s full name and address, Beckie had continued to dig and had uncovered other facets of his life. According to official records, Ted was never in the FBI or CIA. Since age 24, he had never had an address other than his current one. He’d worked for a while as a checkout clerk at the OSU library, then dabbled in (and failed at) insurance sales. His name had never appeared in any newspaper that Beckie could find, either for killing a bodybuilder in self defense or for any number of other hijinx. He was a fraud. He was not the superhuman that he purported to be.

Yet somehow, he was still the tutor, and the tutor was its own enigma. The tutor was relentless, calculating, and astonishingly agile. The tutor had to have an army of workers at his disposal and a perfect accounting system to follow the fate of each of his millions of fliers. The tutor was the perfect urban legend.

“He’s
not
an urban legend,” the Anarchist told Mike, who seemed to be hopping on the Ted-tutor bandwagon. “Urban legends by definition do not exist. This guy exists.”

“No he doesn’t.”

“Call the number and request a tutor. You’ll see how real he is.”

Rich, who was listening in, looked shocked. “I’ll bet you snuck around the house when you were a kid and looked for Christmas presents,” he told the Anarchist.

The Anarchist rolled his eyes.

Rich continued to stare at him. The Anarchist could not imagine what response he was supposed to offer to this affront. He decided on: “‘Snuck’ isn’t a word. It’s ‘sneaked.’”

Rich continued to glare at him.

“It’s a common mistake.”

“We
can’t
call,” Mike said. “It would be wrong.”

“Oh, for shit’s sake!
I’ll
call.”

The Anarchist was back within minutes. The tutor was real, and he was not Ted.

But somehow he still was. Sometimes, late at night, the Anarchist would hear a noise at the half window near the ceiling of his basement bedroom and would start awake. He would wonder if the noise had been real, or only in his head. It could be either – one of those phantom occurrences that happen at the very edge of consciousness like a voice in half-sleep. The Anarchist abhorred those voices, which spoke to him from thin dreams playing themselves out in the curtain space between wakefulness and slumber.

Hey, a dream voice might say. Come over here, will you?

His sluggish, barely-awake mind would process the thought and return a verdict: NOT A REAL VOICE.

After a while, the voice might speak inside his head (or out in the world? Which was it?) for a second time. It always sounded impatient.
 

Hey. Hey, did you get the cheese like I asked you?

His mind would hear the voice again and decide: NOT A REAL VOICE. BORDERLINE DREAM STATE CREATES THE ILLUSION OF PERSISTENT INQUIRY, BUT THIS IS AN APPARITION NONETHELESS.

The voice would ask, even more impatient, Hey. Are you listening to me? Did you get the cheese or not?

Mental wheels would spin, unsure.

I can’t make the quiche without that cheese. Did you forget again?

YOU’RE ON YOUR OWN, ASSHOLE. I’M GOING TO DISNEYWORLD.

Once analysis failed, he would begin to wonder if he should respond to the voice. If he didn’t answer soon, the quiche might never get made.

Hello? he would think to himself.

Why won’t you answer me?

Hello?

Are you deaf?

“Hello?”
 

Once he actually gave in and spoke aloud, he always felt ridiculous. The spoken word felt so loud and alien in the dream half-state that it seemed as if he might wake the world.
 

As the veil of sleep returned, the voice might ask again: Hey. Did you get it?

He sat upright and alert and scanned the room. Nothing there. He looked up at the small window and regarded it. Nothing there either.

Of course.

Now there was a sound at the other end of his room, near his desk. He turned his head and saw a shape there.
 

Or
was
it really there? The voice hadn’t been, after all.

Hey, said the shape.

The Anarchist laid his head down on his pillow and turned away.

Hey.

“Quiet,” he said out loud.

“Hey.”

Had that been aloud? He turned and looked again, and saw the same shape behind the desk. But of course, it was just a pile of clothes.

Hey, want a tutor?

The voice was in his head, but it was unmistakably Ted’s voice.

No? it said. Well, I’ll just leave you a flier in case you change your mind.

Through the cobwebs, the Anarchist thought: Good riddance. And in the morning, there’d been a math tutor flier affixed to the side of his desk.

So Ted was the tutor after all.

When the Anarchist passed his nocturnal discovery on to Jenny, her response was a confusing one.
 

“A mocha today?” she asked.

“What?”

“Do you want a mocha?”

The Anarchist looked at Jenny, her red-dyed hair thrown back over her fall jacket. She was, it seemed, only interested in getting the daily order so that she could steal drinks for the crew from her other job at Java Jive.
 

“Wait a minute,” he said, “what do you think about Ted?”

“I think it would be funny if he got hit by a COTA bus.”

“Shit,” agreed Smooth B.

“Forget it. Yeah, a mocha.”

She turned to Smooth B. “And you? You want your usual manly drink? The iced mocha, blended into a slushie?”

“Yeah.”

Ten minutes after Jenny left, the Anarchist turned to Smooth. “So, do
you
think what I said means that Army Ted is the tutor?”

“From a dream? Shit. I have crazy dreams all the time. I dreamt last night I’s doin’ this chick and my dick turned into a umbrella.”