The Book of Joe (16 page)

twenty-one

Night comes quickly in the Falls, where streetlights are at a minimum, used only to light significant intersections. By the time I finish talking to Owen and step onto the front porch, it's dark out, the meager light radiating from porches and lawn lanterns barely making a dent in the thick shroud of suburban night. Somewhere nearby a dog howls inquisitively at a moon obscured by gray clouds, and in the distance there is the faint sound of a car speeding down Stratfield Road. There are approximately ten books arbitrarily strewn across the front lawn, the word apparently out as to what to do with your used copy of
Bush Falls.

Jared is sitting on the steps, reading a worn paperback copy of
The Sirens of Titan
in the dim porch light. He looks up at me as I step out onto the porch and grins. “Hey, Uncle Joe.” The uncle thing still rings discordantly in my ears, like a word continually repeated until it's shed all meaning.

“Do you ever actually go home?” I say.

“Not lately.” His lips crease into a frown.

“You like Vonnegut?” I sit down beside him, my arrival momentarily dispersing the congregation of moths and mosquitoes worshipping in furious circles around the overhead porch light. We both spend a few seconds batting them away with lethal force, the survivors ultimately regrouping in frenzied congress under the naked bulb, reviewing their battle plan, discussing options.

“He's pretty good,” Jared says. “I had to read
Slaughterhouse Five
for school, and I just kind of got into him.”

I take the book from him and flip through it cursorily, finally coming to rest on the author's quirky inscription at the front.
All persons, places, and events in this book are real,
it reads.
No names have been changed to protect the innocent, since God Almighty protects the innocent as a matter of Heavenly routine.
Vonnegut has missed the point, I think. It's only for the guilty that names need to be changed.

I hand the book back to Jared, who slides it easily into his back pocket. He is wearing loose black jeans and a gray pullover jersey that hangs loosely over his lithe frame. “Where are you headed?” he asks me.

“Nowhere, really,” I say. I intend to call Carly soon, but I'm still somewhat wobbly from my minor breakdown and Owen's subsequent long-distance head shrinking, and I need some time to regroup before I attempt to hold my own with her.

“You look like you could stand some fun,” he says, getting up. “You want to come for a drive?”

“Where to?”

“It's a surprise.”

I consider my nephew for a moment, listen to the three-part harmony of the crickets, and breathe deeply of the cool night air. “What the hell.” I pull myself up to join him. Things seemed to be happening to me, gathering a subtle momentum all their own. Relinquishing my will and adopting the attitude of a carefree passenger feels like the way to go, is actually a relief.

“Cool,” Jared says. “We should probably take your car.”

“You have a car?”

“Nah. That's why we should probably take yours.” He flashes me his trademark smirk and shuffles lazily over to the Mercedes, pulling his hair out of his face and tucking it behind his ears as he goes. I decide to overlook the fact that I've been invited along to wherever primarily because I come with wheels. When he reaches the car, he takes a moment to examine the disfigured door and the smashed taillight, whistling sympathetically, expressing the universal masculine sensitivity to marred beauty generally reserved for circumcisions and damaged imported cars. He turns back to me, eyebrows raised, holds out his open hand expectantly, and says, “Maybe I should drive.”

         

“I heard it was Sean Tallon who beat your ass yesterday,” he says conversationally as he pilots the Mercedes at dangerously high speeds through the shopping district of Bush Falls.

I pull on my seat belt. “Where'd you hear that?”

He ignores the question. “He's one crazy fuck, you know.”

“So I hear,” I say. “But what exactly does that mean?”

He shrugs and takes a hard right. “Probably that you shouldn't have fucked with him.”

“Your dad didn't seem scared of him.”

“Go Dad,” Jared says sourly.

I look at my nephew thoughtfully. “What's the problem between you two?”

“This week, it's the earrings.”

I start to say something, stop myself since it's none of my business, and then, typically, say it anyway. “You do realize that you're going through a stage right now, don't you. That in a few years you'll have outgrown all this rebellion bullshit and none of it will matter.”

“Maybe so,” he concedes, keeping his eyes glued to the road. “But I still have to fight the good fight while it's mine to fight.” He grins lightly. “You might say it's my job.”

“Well, you certainly throw yourself into your work.”

“Whatever,” Jared says. “What's the problem between you and him?”

“Nothing that a few years of intense family therapy couldn't fix.”

“Well, I think the boat's pretty much sailed on that one. What with Grandma gone and Gramps . . . you know.”

I've never heard my mother referred to as Grandma before. It's never occurred to me that the title could be acquired posthumously, and hearing Jared say it is momentarily disorienting. I feel a chill in my belly, a pang of mourning so intense it renders further conversation impossible. We sit in silence for a few minutes until I see that we're headed out of town on Porter's Boulevard. “Where are we going?” I say. “The only thing out here is Porter's.”

“Bingo.”

“What the hell are we doing at Porter's?”

“You'll see.”

P.J. Porter's corporate headquarters is a massive, sprawling five-story building whose exterior is comprised primarily of forbidding dark glass panels and burnished fieldstone, a monument to capitalism. The building is surrounded by acres of rolling, immaculate lawns and strategically placed ponds and fountains, as if it had been plunked down in the middle of a championship golf course. Adding to the overall sense of deliberate seclusion is a perimeter of forestry, roughly one acre deep, that has been deliberately left intact to surround the campus. This expansive, idyllic setting is either a grand testament to modern ergonomics or a corporeal manifestation of the grotesquely inflated collective ego of the Porter family in their financial heyday.

Jared drives past the main entrance, which is gated and locked, and we ride for another few minutes on a narrow road that winds its way through the trees until he suddenly pulls onto a dirt lane that runs into the woods. The lane ends at a gated section of the eight-foot chain-link fence that surrounds the perimeter of the Porter's campus. A group of kids suddenly materialize like ghosts in the narrow glow of the Mercedes' low beams, smoking, leaning against trees, and throwing rocks into the woods, looking like the Lost Boys waiting for Peter Pan's return. They disappear from view as Jared cuts the lights and parks in the forest between a Jeep and a Honda Accord. We step out of the car to join the kids, who all look to be about Jared's age. “What's up, boys?” Jared says, performing a number of multifaceted handshakes with a few of them as they eye me, the aging interloper, with unmasked suspicion. I count six of them, not including Jared and myself.

“Who's this?” a tall, beefy kid with dyed black hair and a blond goatee asks him.

“This is my controversial uncle Joe,” Jared says, indicating me with a wave. “He's going to take Gordy's spot tonight.”

“You the author?” another of the kids pipes up.

“I am,” I say, feeling expressly older and suddenly self-conscious in my merino sweater and Brooks Brothers chinos. They are all dressed pretty much alike, in black T-shirts or sweatshirts, dark, baggy cargo pants, and sneakers. All of their faces are cluttered with the shrapnel of rebellion, as if a grenade of alienation has exploded in their midst, piercing every possible soft point of flesh—from earlobes and nostrils to eyebrows, lips, and tongues—with metal studs and rings.

“The author of what?” someone else wants to know, and a brief discussion of my credentials ensues.

“He wrote that movie about the Falls, man. Where that kid fucks his mother.”

“He wrote the book, dipshit. Then they made it into a movie.”

“Whatever, man.”

“He fucks his mother?”

“It's the friend's mother, you tool. And they don't fuck. He just has a hard-on for her.”

“Oh. That's okay. I have a hard-on for Jared's mother.”

“Shut the fuck up, Mikey!”

“What, you don't think your mother's hot? Be honest.”

“Bite me.”

Having resolved all of these matters, the goateed boy, whose name I now know is Mikey, steps forward. “Yo, Jared, what's the deal with bringing a grown-up to the game?”

“He's cool,” Jared says easily. “He won't tell. And it's just this once, since we need to replace Gordy.”

They all consider me for a moment, frowning thoughtfully, and I feel like the class geek standing in a dwindling crowd, waiting to be chosen by one of the teams for dodgeball. Finally, Mikey steps forward and shakes my hand. “Okay, man,” he says. “As long as you don't, you know, have a heart condition or anything.”

“I'm good,” I say wryly.

“Okay,” Jared says, flashing me an approving smile. “Let's do it.”

         

“It” turns out to be paintball. Mikey opens the back of his Jeep, and everyone clamors around as he hands out a slew of pneumatic air guns designed to look convincingly like cutting-edge terrorist weaponry. The boys are all business as they outfit their guns, speaking to one another in technical jargon about flip loaders, barrel plugs, hose kits, butt plates, and twenty-ounce CO
₂
bottles. There is something almost professional in the easy familiarity of their references to cockers and beavertails, and if they were ever amused by the sexual innuendo in those terms, they've long since gotten over it. Jared hands me my gun, an Autococker 2000, and gives me a brief lesson in loading my vertical CO
₂
bottle and feeding my cylindrical magazine of paintballs into the barrel. He hands me a black knapsack containing a pair of goggles, extra ammunition, and CO
₂
bottles.

Once everyone has a gun and gear secured to his body with Velcro and shoulder straps, they begin scaling the chain-link fence one by one, flipping easily over the top, and dropping down softly onto the grounds of the Porter's campus. I can't remember the last time I climbed a fence, and when my turn comes, I throw myself at it with a burst of physical intensity, determined not to embarrass myself by getting hung up or crushing my balls as I straddle the top. Once we're all assembled on the other side, we jog silently through the dense woods, which in the impenetrable darkness seem to go on forever. We fan out when we hit the large expanse of the back lawn, the titanium casings of the guns we clutch gleaming in the blue light of the moon. It's easy to imagine that we're a team of commandos infiltrating an enemy compound, and I feel a burst of childish adrenaline as we come over a knoll and I can make out the massive black structure of the office building looming in the distance.

I slow down as we pass the small lake where Sammy, Wayne, and I hung out so often that summer. I remember how Wayne looked flying through the spray as he jumped off the geyser's platform. Now the geyser is off, and the dark water lies still as a sheet of glass. In my head I hear the faint strains of Springsteen singing “Spirit in the Night,” like an echo, and I feel something hot tremble briefly in my chest, but I don't stop running. This place is spooky enough; I don't need my own ghosts adding to the atmosphere.

This is clearly not the first time these kids have trespassed here, and they all move as one toward a loading bay on the far left side of the building. Two of them disappear into some shrubbery and return with crowbars, which they place under the rubber rim of one of the loading bay doors and force it up. The door moves smoothly on its rollers and we all file inside, the last ones in pulling down the door behind them. Jared now takes the lead, and we follow single file down a hallway and into a stairwell. We climb four flights and step out into an immense atrium filled with attached cubicles that extend across the width and breadth as far as the eye can see.

“They shut the place down when they went out of business,” Jared explains to me as the other guys throw their gear down onto desks and begin loading and making adjustments to their guns. Apparently, silence is no longer required. “Everything is locked up while the lawyers fight it all out, so nothing's been touched.”

I walk slowly through the continuous rows of cubicles, all still furnished with desks, chairs, computer terminals, phones, and fax machines. Many cubicle walls still have photos and posters adorning them, the accessories of low-level employees trying to forget that they occupy but one minuscule nook in the overall honeycomb. There is an atmosphere of apocalyptic desolation to the place, this once vast and bustling enterprise now a haunted corporate wasteland. As far as paintball goes, you couldn't ask for a better venue.

We split into two teams of four, Jared and I being paired with two kids, one named Grossman, chubby and riddled with acne, and the other simply called Tree, maybe an abbreviation or maybe because he is easily the tallest one in the group. The two teams head to opposite sides of the colossal atrium to hang their flags, then someone blows a whistle and the game begins. The next two hours are spent tearing madly through the labyrinth of cubicles, hiding, ducking, shooting, and screaming. Each game lasts roughly twenty minutes and ends when either all four teammates are “dead” or someone manages to pull off the far more difficult feat of stealing the opposing team's flag without getting shot. At first I am tentative, feeling silly and juvenile, but after my first “kill,” I surrender to the primitive thrill of the game, losing myself in the adrenal haze of simulated battle. The paintballs, actually condensed gelatin caplets, sting painfully on impact, but the pain, too, is part of the rush. And there's no denying the added, illicit thrill that comes from the sense of real danger, as we are indisputably trespassers and vandals. The trappings of the ruined corporate civilization that comprise our battlefield add a surrealistic subtext to the game, giving it an otherworldly feel that, combined with the youthful battle cries reverberating off the high glass ceiling, is reminiscent of
Lord of the Flies.
Only when a time-out is called after the fourth game, and we all gather in the center conference area to rest, do I identify the alien sensation I'm feeling as fun.