The Broom of the System (12 page)

I miss Lenore, sometimes. I miss everyone. I can remember being young and feeling a thing and identifying it as homesickness, and then thinking well now that’s odd, isn’t it, because I
was
home, all the time. What on earth are we to make of that?

I miss and love with all my purple fist a strange girl from a flamboyant and frightening family, in many ways a flamboyant and frightening girl, perched high in the crow’s nest of the Frequent and Vigorous vessel, scanning gray electrical expanses for the lonely spout of a legitimate telephone call. I am lately informed by Ms. Peahen that the possibility of such a call is, now, thanks to some malfunction in the phone system of which we are a part, even more remote than before. As I sit here, the block of the Erieview shadow slowly dips my office in liquid darkness. Halfway, now. It is one o‘clock. My lights turn the shadow half of the office to licorice, and make the half still under the influence of the sun a glinting yellow-white horror at which I may not look. Lenore, I shall try once more, and if you are not here I will assume the worst, and will succumb finally to the charms of Moses Cleaveland, who even now grins and beckons whitely from the pavement six floors below. This is our last chance.

As Lenore sifted through a tidal wave of misdirected calls and got ready to try to call Karl Rummage over at Rummage and Naw, Walinda Peahen appeared in the cubicle behind the switchboard counter.

“Hi Walinda,” Lenore said. Walinda ignored her and began to look through the Legitimate Call Log, a desperately thin notebook with one or two pages filled. Judith Prietht had hit her Position Busy button and was talking to a girlfriend on the private line.

“What these messages for you in the Log in Candy’s writing?” Walinda turned-and looked down at Lenore from under green eye shadow.

“I guess if they’re legitimate then they’re messages for me,” said Lenore.

“Girl I ain’t playin’ with you, so I wish you’d learn not to play. You supposed to be here at ten. There’s messages for you here at eleven and eleven-thirty.”

“I was unavoidably detained. Candy said she’d cover.”

“That flakey Frequent and Vigorous girl is getting chewed out by her supervisor,” Judith Prietht was saying into her phone, watching.

“Girl detained where? How do I look if I think somebody workin’ and they not?”

“I had to go to the nursing home.”

“What time she get here?” Walinda asked Judith Prietht.

“Look, I don’t want to say anything, I don’t want to get her in trouble,” Judith said to Walinda. Into the phone she said, “The supervisor wanted me to say when she got here, but I said I wouldn‘t, I didn’t want to get her in trouble.”

“I got here at like a little after twelve.”

“Like a little after twelve. Girl that’s over two hours late.”

“It was an emergency.”

“What kind of goddamn emergency?”

Judith Prietht had stopped talking into the phone and was watching intently.

“I can’t tell you right at the moment, Walinda,” Lenore said.

“Girl, you gone, you done, I don’t care who you doin’ up, you can’t play. You done played the last time.”

The console began to beep, the light with a quick, in-house flash.

“Don’t even get it, you gone,” Walinda said to Lenore. She reached for the phone and Accessed. “Operator ...” Her eyebrows plunged. “Yes she is, Mr. Vigorous. Hold on one moment please.” She held her hand over the phone as she passed it to Lenore. “I don’t care what you get the little pecker to say, you gone,” she hissed.

“She’s really in trouble, it looks like, for a change,” said Judith into her phone.

“Hi Rick.”

“How are your steaks, tonight?”

“Our steaks, sir, are if I may say so quite simply superb. Only the choicest cuts of beef, carefully selected and even more carefully aged, cooked to perfection as perfection is defined by your instructions, served with your choice of potato and vegetable and richly delicious dessert.”

“Sounds scrumptious.”

“Yes.”

“I’ll have nine.”

“Pardon me?”

“Bring me nine steaks, please.”

“You want
nine
steak dinners?”

“Please.”

“And who, sir, may I ask is going to eat them?”

“You see anybody else sitting here? I’m going to eat them.”

“And how on earth are you going to do that, sir?”

“Well, gee, let’s see, I think I’ll use my right hand to cut, tonight. I’ll put pieces into my mouth, I’ll masticate, acidic elements in my saliva will begin breaking down the muscle fiber. I’ll swallow. Et cetera. Bring ‘em on!”

“Sir, nine steaks would make anyone sick.”

“Look at me. Look at this stomach. Do you think I’ll get sick? No way. Come here—no, really, come around and look at this stomach. Let me lift up my shirt ... here. See how much I can grab with my hand? I can’t even sit close to the table. Have you ever seen anything so hugely disgusting in your whole life?”

“I’ve seen bigger stomachs.”

“You’re just being polite, you just want a tip. You’ll get your tip, after you’ve brought me nine steak dinners, with perfection being defined as medium-rare, which is to say pink yet firm. And don’t forget the rolls.”

“Sir, this is simply beyond my range of experience. I’ve never served any one individual nine simultaneous orders on my own authority. I could get in horrible trouble. What if, for example, you have an embolism, God forbid? You could rupture organs.”

“Didn’t I say to look at me? Can’t you tell what I am? Listen to me very carefully. I am an obese, grotesque, prodigal, greedy, gour mandizing, gluttonous pig. Is this not clear? I am more hog than human. There is room, physical room, for
you
in my stomach. Do you hear? You see before you a swine. An eating fiend of unlimited capacity. Bring me meat.”

“Have you not eaten in a very long time? Is that it?”

“Look, you’re beginning to bother me. I could bludgeon you with my belly. I am also, allow me to tell you, more than a little well-to-do. Do you see that Building over there, the one with the lit windows, in the shadow? I own that Building. I could buy this restaurant and have you terminated. I could and perhaps will buy this entire block, including that symbolically tiny Weight Watchers establishment across the street. See it? With the door and windows so positioned as to form a grinning, leering, hollow-cheeked face? It is within my financial power to buy that place, and to fill it with steaks, fill it with red steak, all of which I would and will eat. The door would under this scenario be jammed with a gnawed bone; not a single little smug psalm-singing baggy-skinned apostate from the cause of adiposity would be able to enter. They would pound on the door, pound. But the bone would hold. They’d lack the bulk to burst through. Their mouths and eyes would be wide as they pressed against the glass. I would demolish, physically crush the huge scale at the end of the brightly lit nave at the back of the place under a weight of food. The springs would jut out. Jut. What a delicious series of thoughts. May I see a wine list?”

“Weight Watchers?”

“Garçon,
what you have before you is a dangerous thing, I warn you. Human beings act in their own interest. Huge, crazed swine do not. My wife informed me a certain time-interval ago that if I did not lose weight, she would leave me. I have not lost weight, as a matter of fact I have gained weight, and thus she is leaving. Q.E.D. And A-1, don’t forget the A-1.”

“But sir, surely with more time ...”

“There is no more time. Time does not exist. I ate it. It’s in here, see? See the jiggle? That’s time, jiggling. Run, run away, fetch me my platter of fat, my nine cattle, or I’ll envelop you in a chin and fling you at the wall!”

“Shall I fetch the
maître
d‘, sir? To confer?”

“By all means, fetch him. But warn him against getting too close. He will be encompassed instantly, before he has time to squeak. Tonight I will eat. Hugely, and alone. For I am now hugely alone. I will eat, and juice might very well spurt into the air around me, and if anyone comes too near, I will snarl and jab at them with my fork—like this, see?”

“Sir, really!”

“Run for your very life. Fetch something to placate me. I’m going to grow and grow, and fill the absence that surrounds me with the horror of my own gelatinous presence. Yin and Yang. Ever growing, waiter. Run!”

“Right away, sir!”

“Some breadsticks might have been nice, too, do you hear? What kind of place is this, anyway?”

“I insist that you tell me.”

“Could you just possibly wait, for about nine tenths of a second, while I decide how to tell you?”

“What does deciding have to do with it? There’s a thing, and here am I, tell me the thing,
voilà.
Clearly there’s something bothering you.”

“Look, I’m obviously going to tell you, OK? Don’t have a spasm. It’s just that the thing I have to tell is, a, unbelievably weird, and I don’t even really understand it ...”

“So let’s have both our powers of understanding leveled at the thing, together. Whose power of understanding and persuasion soothed a potentially disastrously pissed-off Walinda for you, after all?”

“... and b, is something I was told not to tell, so I have to figure out a way to tell you in a way that’s going to least compromise my promise not to tell, and least make anything bad happen to the person whom the thing concerns.”

“Clear as a bell. As clear as this water glass, Lenore.”

“Don’t flick your water glass. Look, you said this place had really great steaks, and you said you were starving, so why don’t you just concentrate on the impending arrival of your steak, which I sort of think is coming right now?”

“....”

“Looks super, thank you. Rick, would we care for wine?”

“Yes.”

“What kind?”

“ ... ”

“What
kind?”

“ .... ”

“We’ll maybe just have a bottle of your house red, if that’s OK.... You are a baby. You have the understanding and compassion of a very very small child, sometimes.”

“Lenore, it’s simply that I love you. You know that. Every fiber of your being is loved by every fiber of my being. The thought of things about you, concerning you, troubling you, that I don’t know about, makes blood run from my eyes, on the inside.”

“Interesting image. Look, try your steak. You said you were in a position to eat a horse.”

“ .... ”

“Does that hit the spot?”

“My spot is reeling under the force of the blow. Now I insist that you tell me.”

“ .... ”

“Does this have to do with your trying to call that Rummage person while I was busy keeping Walinda from forcing me to choose between her services and yours, even though she was hired by Frequent himself? Shall I simply get up and go call Rummage right now?”

“He’s not there. He’s not here.”

“ .... ”

“He’s apparently out of the country, with my father.”

“Doing what?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“Is this the same ‘I can’t tell you,’ or a different one?”

“Different. ”

“Deeply hurt and pissed off, now.”

“Look, can I just assure you that I’ll tell you later, and not tell you now, and think, and eat my salad? Would that be OK? I’ll stay at your place tonight, which I actually really want to do, even though I told Candy I’d be back home tonight, and we’ll talk. I really do need your advice. Yours especially, Rick. I just have to figure out what’s going on myself, first, for a second, OK?”

“It’s really quite bad, and it has to do with the nursing home, and no one has passed away.”

“Eat your steak.”

“I only—”

“Rick, who’s that?”

“Where?”

“Over there, by himself, at that table?”

“You don’t know who that is?”

“No.”

“That’s Norman Bombardini. Our landlord and Building-mate, of Bombardini Company and skeleton eye-socket fame.”

“He’s a large person.”

“He is large.”

“Gigantic, is more like it. Why’s he snarling and gnawing on the edge of the table?”

“Good Lord. My understanding, which I get mostly from War-shaver over at the club, is that these are just not good times for Norman. Problems with his wife. Problems with his health.”

“He looks like he really needs to lose some weight.”

“I guess he’s tried, off and on, for years. An interesting man. War-shaver hints around that his company is on the verge of a real—”

“Oh my God.”

“What?”

“Look at what the waiter’s bringing.”

“Good Lord.”

“There is just no way someone can eat all that.”

“Poor Norman.”

“Oh, that’s sick. He could at least wait till the waiter put it on the table.”

“Must be really hungry.”

“Nobody’s that hungry. And did he just try to bite the waiter? Was that an attempted bite?”

“Must be the light in here.”

“He’s really making a mess.”

“I’ve never seen him like this.”

“He’s getting juice on the people at the other tables. That lady just put her napkin on her head!”

“Is that a napkin? It’s really quite fetching.”

“You’re horrible. Look, they’re having to leave.”

“Well, it looked like they were almost done, anyway.”

“Well I’m not. I’m not going to look anymore.”

“Probably wise.”

“....”

“....”

“But I can’t really help hearing, now, can I?”

“Unfortunately not.”

“God, look at that, he’s almost done with all that. He has eaten a literal mountain of food in about two minutes.”

“Well, a lot of it’s on the floor, too, after all.”