The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg (82 page)

“Well, I mean, fear of failure, obviously. Fear of mediocrity.”

For an instant he thought he might be sick.

“Right,” he said. “And why should I fear failure and mediocrity? Failure and mediocrity have such august traditions! Anyhow, what’s up with you, Amity?”

She’d been easily distracted, and they chatted on for a while, but when they hung up, he felt very, very strange, as if his apartment had slightly changed shape. Amity was right, he’d thought; it was fear that stood between him and the life he’d meant to be leading.

That was probably the coldest night of the whole, difficult millennium. The timid midwestern sun had basically gone down at the beginning of September; it wouldn’t be around much again till May. Black ice glared on the street outside like the cloak of an extra-cruel witch. The sink faucet was dripping into a cracked and stained teacup:
Tick tock tick tock…

What was he
doing
? Once he’d dreamed of designing tranquil and ennobling dwellings, buildings that urged benign relationships, rich inner harmonies; he’d dreamed of meeting fascinating strangers. True, he’d managed to avoid certain pitfalls of middle-class adulthood—he wasn’t a white-collar criminal, for example; he wasn’t (at least as far as he knew) a total blowhard. But what was he
actually doing
? His most exciting social contact was the radio. He spent his salaried hours in a cinder-block office building, poring over catalogues of plumbing fixtures. The rest of the day—and the whole evening, too—he sat at the little desk his parents had bought for him when he was in junior high, slaving over
Passivityman
, a comic strip that ran in free papers all over parts of the Midwest, a comic strip that was doted on by whole dozens, the fact was, of stoned undergrads.

He was twenty-four years old! Soon he’d be twenty-eight. In a few more minutes he’d be thirty-five, then fifty. Five zero. How had that happened? He was eighty! He could feel his vascular system and brain clogging with paste, he was drooling…

And if history had anything to teach, it was that he’d be broke when he was eighty, too, and that his personal life would still be a disaster.

But wait. Long ago, panic had sent his grandparents and parents scurrying from murderous Europe, with its death camps and pogroms, to the safe harbor of New York. Panic had kept them going as far as the Midwest, where grueling labor enabled them and eventually their children to lead blessedly ordinary lives. And sooner or later, Nathaniel’s pounding heart was telling him, that same sure-footed guide, panic, would help him retrace his family’s steps all the way back to Manhattan.

Opportunism

Blip!
Charlie scatters again as Lucien’s attention wavers from her and the empty space belonging to her is seized by Miss Mueller.

Huh, but what do you know—death
suits
Miss Mueller! In life she was drab, but now she absolutely throbs with ghoulishness.
You there, Lucien
—the shriek echoes around the gallery—
What are the world’s three great religions?

Zen Buddhism, Jainism, and Sufism, he responds sulkily.

Naughty boy!
She cackles flirtatiously.
Bang bang, you’re dead!

The Half-life of Passivity

Passivityman is taking a snooze, his standard response to stress, when the alarm rings. “I’ll check it out later, boss,” he murmurs.

“You’ll check it out
now
, please,” his girlfriend and superior, the beautiful Princess Prudence, tells him. “Just put on those grubby corduroys and get out there.”

“Aw, is it really
urgent
?” he asks.

“Don’t you get it?” she says. “I’ve been warning you, episode after episode! And now, from his appliance-rich house on the Moon, Captain Corporation has tightened his Net of Evil around the planet Earth, and he’s dragging it out of orbit! The U.S. Congress is selected by pharmaceutical companies, the state of Israel is run by Christian fundamentalists, the folks that haul toxic sludge manufacture cattle feed and process burgers, your sources of news and information are edited by a giant mouse, New York City and Christian fundamentalism are holdings of a family in Kuwait—
and all of it’s owned by Captain Corporation
!”

Passivityman rubs his eyes and yawns. “Well gosh, Pru, sure—but, like, what am I supposed to do about it?”

“
I
don’t know,” Princess Prudence says. “It’s hardly my job to figure that out, is it? I mean,
you’re
the superhero. Just—Just—just go out and do something conspicuously lacking in monetary value! Invent some stinky, profit-proof gloop to pour on stuff. Or, I don’t know, whatever. But you’d better do
something
, before it’s too late.”

“Sounds like it’s totally too late already,” says Passivityman, reaching for a cigarette.

It was quite a while ago now that Passivityman seemed to throw in the towel. Nathaniel’s friends looked at the strip with him and scratched their heads.

“Hm, I don’t know, Nathaniel,” Amity said. “This episode is awfully complicated. I mean, Passivityman’s seeming kind of passive-
aggressive
, actually.”

“Can Passivityman not be bothered any longer to protect the abject with his greed-repelling Shield of Sloth?” Lyle asked.

“It’s not going to be revealed that Passivityman is a double agent, is it?” Madison said. “I mean, what about his undying struggle against corporate-model efficiency?”

“The truth is, I don’t really know what’s going on with him,” Nathaniel said. “I was thinking that maybe, unbeknownst to himself, he’s come under the thrall of his morally neutral, transgendering twin, Ambiguityperson.”

“Yeah,” Madison said. “But I mean, the problem here is that he’s just not dealing with the paradox of his own being—he seems kind of
intellectually
passive…”

Oh, dear. Poor Passivityman. He was a
tired
old crime fighter. Nathaniel sighed; it was hard to live the way his superhero lived—constantly vigilant against the premature conclusion, scrupulously rejecting the vulgar ambition, rigorously deferring judgment and action…and all for the greater good.

“Huh, well, I guess he’s sort of losing his superpowers,” Nathaniel said.

The others looked away uncomfortably.

“Oh, it’s probably just one of those slumps,” Amity said. “I’m sure he’ll be back to normal, soon.”

But by now, Nathaniel realizes, he’s all but stopped trying to work on
Passivityman
.

All This

Thanks for pointing that out, Miss Mueller. Yes, humanity seems to have reverted by a millennium or so. Goon squads, purporting to represent each of the
world’s three great religions
—as they used to be called to fifth-graders, and perhaps still so misleadingly are—have deployed themselves all over the map, apparently in hopes of annihilating not only each other, but absolutely everyone, themselves excepted.

Just a few weeks earlier, Lucien was on a plane heading home from Los Angeles, and over the loudspeaker, the pilot requested that all Christians on board raise their hands. The next sickening instants provided more than enough time for conjecture as to who, exactly, was about to be killed—Christians or non-Christians. And then the pilot went on to ask those who had raised their hands to talk about their “faith” with the others.

Well, better him than Rose and Isaac; that would have been two sure heart attacks, right there. And anyhow, why should he be so snooty about religious fanaticism? Stalin managed to kill off over thirty million people in the name of no god at all, and not so very long ago.

At the moment when
all this
—as Lucien thinks of it—began, the moment when a few ordinary-looking men carrying box cutters sped past the limits of international negotiation and the frontiers of technology, turning his miraculous city into a nightmare and hurling the future into a void, Lucien was having his croissant and coffee.

The television was saying something. Lucien wheeled around and stared at it, then turned to look out the window; downtown, black smoke was already beginning to pollute the perfect, silken September morning. On the screen, the ruptured, flaming colossus was shedding veils of tiny black specks.

All circuits were busy, of course; the phone might as well have been a toy. Lucien was trembling as he shut the door of the apartment behind him. His face was wet. Outside, he saw that the sky in the north was still insanely blue.

The Age of Dross

Well, superpowers are probably a feature of youth, like Wendy’s ability to fly around with that creepy Peter Pan. Or maybe they belonged to a loftier period of history. It seems that Captain Corporation, his swaggering lieutenants and massed armies have actually neutralized Passivityman’s superpower. Passivityman’s astonishing reserves of resistance have vanished in the quicksand of Captain Corporation’s invisible account books. His rallying cry, No way, which once rang out over the land, demobilizing millions, has been altered by Captain Corporation’s co-optophone into, whatever. And the superpowers of Nathaniel’s friends have been seriously challenged, too. Challenged, or…outgrown.

Amity’s superpower, her gift for exploiting systemic weaknesses, had taken a terrible beating several years ago when the gold she spun out on the trading floor turned—just like everyone else’s—into straw. And subsequently, she plummeted from job to job, through layers of prestige, ending up behind a counter in a fancy department store where she sold overpriced skin-care products.

Now, of course, the sale of
Inner Beauty Secrets
—her humorous, lightly fictionalized account of her experiences there with her clients—indicates that perhaps her powers are regenerating. But time will tell.

Madison’s superpower, an obtuse, patrician equanimity in the face of damning fact, was violently and irremediably terminated one day when a girl arrived at the door asking for him.

“I’m your sister,” she told him. “Sorry,” Madison said, “I’ve never seen you before in my life.” “Hang on,” the girl said. “I’m just getting to that.”

For months afterward, Madison kept everyone awake late into the night repudiating all his former beliefs, his beautiful blue eyes whirling around and his hair standing on end as if he’d stuck his hand into a socket. He quit his lucrative PR job and denounced the firm’s practices in open letters to media watchdog groups (copies to his former boss). The many women who’d been running after him did a fast about-face.

Amity called him a “bitter skeptic” he called Amity a “dupe.” The heated quarrel that followed has tapered off into an uneasy truce, at best.

Lyle’s superpower back in school was his spectacular level of aggrievedness and his ability to get anyone at all to feel sorry for him. But later, doing sound with a Paris-based dance group, Lyle met Jahan, who was doing the troupe’s lighting.

Jahan is (a) as handsome as a prince, (b) as charming, as intelligent, as noble in his thoughts, feelings, and actions as a prince, and (c) a prince, at least of some attenuated sort. So no one feels sorry for Lyle at all any longer, and Lyle has apparently left the pleasures of even
self
-pity behind him without a second thought.

Awhile ago, though, Jahan was mistakenly arrested in some sort of sweep near Times Square, and when he was finally released from custody, he moved to London, and Lyle does nothing but pine, when he can’t be in London himself.

“Well, look on the bright side,” Nathaniel said. “At least you might get your superpower back.”

“You know, Nathaniel…” Lyle said. He looked at Nathaniel for a moment, and then an unfamiliar kindness modified his expression. He patted Nathaniel on the shoulder and went on his way.

Yikes. So much for Lyle’s superpower, obviously.