Category: Stories

I. Scott Proehl and his Hard-To-Pronounce-Last-Name

When Fisher Pinckney leaned forward for a better view of the commotion at the front of the line, he saw a tiny kerchiefed woman wagging her wrinkled brownspotted finger menacingly over the counter. He strained to hear her gravely measured words: “Then may this plane drop from the sky like a stone!” His eyebrows arched reflexively as he studied the agent’s unblinking stony reaction. Into the silence the computer terminal gave a plaintive bleat from behind the counter. The blue-suited gate agent managed a pinched professional smile and said, “Apparently we do have a seat for you after all, Mrs. Trismegos.” The woman just ahead of Fisher kick-shoved her lumpy carry-on bag one step toward the counter, saying in a low tone, “Don’t they have to treat that like a bomb threat or something? That woman gives me the creeps.”

For Fisher, air travel brought with it a luxurious sense of abdication. Against all expectation, it was a temporary suspension of worldly hassle. The aluminum airframe had a womblike embracing appeal: for the duration of a flight he was completely, blissfully beyond reach. There was nothing else to do except read a book, perhaps drink a beer or two while mysterious forces conducted him through the air. Flight delays troubled him very little, because it just meant a little more off-line reading time. More so than ever, he wasn’t looking forward to the end of this flight. He had made up his mind to break up with Molly once and for all once he got back to Baltimore. He could picture her waiting for him at the end of the exit ramp. What reaction would he give? What emotion should he project, must he betray? When would he break open his bottle of poison? He felt so sick and bleak that the thought of spiraling from the sky because of the kerchiefed woman’s curse had a certain tragic appeal.

As he was preparing to board Flight 817 to Baltimore, his ear picked a familiar southern drawl from the airport noise: “Not Prole. P-R-O-E-H-L, like Prail.” He turned to see, at the checkin desk, Scott Proehl, his high school classmate and one-time best friend. Fisher caught a clear glimpse of him: heavier, balder, and very tired. Then he gave his ticket to the attendant and moved down the jetway.

II. Controlled Flight Into Terrain

Scott and Fisher had played in a band together in high school. Scott was the more talented of the two, and Fisher later learned that he had gone on to some musical success in college. Fisher had played in a college band too, the Sad Clichés, but when he realized they had fanatical groupies despite the fact that they were extremely bad, it depressed him so much that he had to quit. Now as he moved to his seat, he fretted over whether or how to greet Scott.

Fisher found himself four rows behind Scott Proehl and in the same row, but just across the aisle from, Mrs. Trismegos. Her mouth was drawn in a taut, stitched line of concern; her hands clutched what Fisher supposed was a crucifix. He made a point of smiling at her. Whether it was friendly and encouraging or smug and baiting he couldn’t be sure. His emotional compass, never reliable, was off its bearings entirely recently.

The flight, as it happened, was extremely bumpy and chaotic. At one point, the flight attendent lurched to prevent being knocked to the floor, sending a spray of Diet Coke over Fisher. She cried out with a sharp expletive, then, flustered, hurried the drink cart back to be locked down. Fisher met eyes with the kerchiefed woman. “Young man, do you think we are going to die?” He smiled again, though queasiness drained his voice of real confidence. “No, we’re not going to die. Weather like this almost never knocks down planes. If a plane crashes, it’s usually because the pilots don’t know any better and fly straight into a mountain, BOOM!” He smacked a fist into his other hand forcefully. “But we’re way up high. It’s uncomfortable, but very safe.” She nodded blankly, then stared out the window and crossed herself. After a few seconds she chuckled in a deep, chronic-smoker sort of way and turned again to look at him. Her gaze was piercing but surprisingly calm and warm. “Yes yes,” she said slowly and distinctly, “Never fate, only blindness. That is true.” Soon after that, despite continued turbulence and flashes of lightning, Mrs. Trismegos fell soundly asleep.

III. No time to lose

After the plane had landed, Fisher stood in the crowded aisle and debated his next move. Though it was avoidable, he decided he had to say something to Scott. It had been a long time, after all. As he started forward he called forward, “Scott, it’s me, Fisher Pinckney. Remember?”

“Well hey, Fisher. Long time no see.” The last time they saw each other was at the beach immediately after high school graduation. There had been an awkward drunken fight, the kind of fight that middle-class kids who never fought before have. Before that moment, Fisher would have described Scott as a close friend. Since that moment, they had not spoken. Because they went to different colleges? Because they hated each other? Scott looked oily and overweight.

Scott said, “You got a mess on your shirt, there, Fisher.” Fisher said, “Turbulence.”

Fisher asked a question. Scott said, “I’m a sales engineer for DPM. We make electrical connectors.” Fisher asked another question. Scott said, “Yeah, two little boys. Lynn and I just had our seventh anniversary.” Scott didn’t ask a question. Fisher didn’t say, “Fuck you for how you treated me. Fuck you for never apologizing.” Scott said “Okay, then. Well…!” as though that were an ordinary way to say goodbye. Then he turned slightly to indicate that the conversation was now over. His face wore an absent transaction-completed smile. They waddled off the plane and through the umbilical connection to the terminal.

Fisher walked slowly, so slowly, toward the greeting area, pulling himself from the unhappy past into the cruel present. He looked up, expecting to catch sight of Molly, and was amazed to see the tiny Mrs. Trismegos talking animatedly to Molly and gesturing toward him. By the time he reached Molly, the old woman had moved on.

Molly wore a long purple dress. She carried a single rose, but it drooped to one side. Instead she offered him a card.

“What did she say to you?” Fisher asked.

“She asked me to give this to you. She said you were her friend. Do you know her?”

“We talked for maybe two minutes on the plane. Why would she come up to you like that?” He examined the card. It was a business card labeled “M. Trismegos, Tarot, Palmistry.” Then in italics next to a bad drawing of three candles and a rose: “No time to lose.”

“Did she say anything else to you?”

Molly hesitated. “She said I was very beautiful.”

Surprised, Fisher looked up from the card and into Molly’s flushed, anxious face, saw her shining eyes. “You are very beautiful,” he said quietly. She looked down at her sandaled feet and moved closer to him, uncertain whether to hug. She looked up again.

Then: the intercom said, “Mr. Scott Prole, please meet your party at the baggage claim.”

Fisher felt strangely light, like a tiny bubble of carbonation spiraling upward in a glass of Diet Coke. He realized he was surpressing a tiny grin.

Molly said, “What’s that on your shirt?”

Fisher said, “Let’s get out of here.”

In the cool night air of mid-May somewhere in the canyon-cut hills near Prescott, Arizona, Paul Rossetti leaned back in his worn-out aluminum deck chair and scanned the heavens with a big pair of binoculars. Friends used to tease him about the irony of a one-eyed man using binoculars, until eventually Rossetti affixed a jaunty black paper patch over the left exit tube of his favorite binoculars. Every night when the weather permitted, which was often, he would tune the radio to KFCS, the local country music station, lean back and comb through the skies for anything new. In particular he was looking for a distinctive faint fuzzball of bluish light. In particular, he was looking for a comet. It was not an idle occupation — across twelve years he had narrowly missed getting his name on a comet three times, twice losing to Shirou Shikakura. His one claim to the record books was Comet 1989 II Shikakura-Ortiz-Rossetti, a dim bulb of a comet that was never visible to the naked eye. He craved bigger game.

When it finally swam into Paul Rossetti’s field of view, his eye widened and his stomach tightened with excitement. As soon as his laptop’s modem dialed in, he tapped out a hasty email to Kurt Drovecki at the Smithsonian Observatory in Cambridge:

After fifteen excruciating minutes of checking for new messages, he was about to pick up the phone when he got a reply.

By that time, Paul Rossetti had been following the tiny incandescent fuzzball for some twenty minutes. Comet Designate 1998 VII, soon to be known as Comet Rossetti. “Comet Rossetti” he announced quietly to the tall saguaro cactus near his driveway, to his satellite dish, to his sunburned Chevy Suburban. He stood up, his heartbeat beginning to gallop, and screamed “Comet Rossetti!” to the city of Prescott, Arizona, to the Smithsonian Observatory in Cambridge, to the approaching Comet 1998 VII somewhere inside the orbit of Saturn.

Rossetti was still savoring a celebratory Scotch in his living room at 4 AM when the phone rang. Drovecki, calling from Cambridge, wasted no time: “Look, Paul, I ran some numbers on your comet and it, well it looks like there’s a good chance it’ll hit Earth next June after it hooks around the Sun. It’s… it looks like a big boy. Obviously I’m running the calculations every way I can think of, but I wanted to let you know right away. Why don’t you sit tight on this one till we get a little more information.” There followed a tense jargon-filled interchange which served to convince Rossetti that his planet would likely be smashed beyond recognition before he could pay off his Chevy.

He sat perfectly still and listened to the dial tone that Drovecki left behind. For perhaps a full minute, his mind was jammed, clogged with the inconsequential details of an inconceivable event. As the details sifted slowly down to dust, he was overcome with a soul-eclipsing loneliness. It swallowed him like the horizon-to-horizon shadow of a fast-approaching storm. Immediately his thoughts went to his ex-wife Karen. He thought not about how they met at the university bowling alley, not about the ridiculously expensive wedding in Louisiana, or the corrosive hateful lies they told each other in their last bitter year together. Instead, he thought about how they made love a month after the divorce was final. He thought about how he knew, even as it was happening, that they were both going to regret it terribly, but in fact they never had.

Now that moment hung in his mind like a glowing jewel. If Comet 1998 VII had any sense of justice, it would have smacked him then, in that moment of pure burned-over joy, perched between known misery and unseen despair. He had set out with unfeigned relief the next day to give his full attention to the skies, the rational skies, the lonely skies. Now five years later at this singular moment he was choked with a desire to hold her, but she lay in someone else’s arms.

And this was his reward: a snowball the size of South America bearing his name set to eliminate civilization. Not simply life as we know it, but perhaps life, all life, forever. Only now was it starting to reach him, setting in with a wave overpowering nausea — this Doomsday missile will be called Comet Rossetti, with him playing the role of, what? Executioner? Betrayer? No, it was as though he were the doctor delivering a terminal diagnosis to an entire planet. No future for him, for the his parents, for the inhabitants of Prescott, of Los Angeles, of Moscow, no future for the birds, the fish, all silenced forever. The name Rossetti eternally synonymous with doom. Staggering to the bathroom, he vomited into the wide toilet mouth the remains of a vegetable burrito and his celebratory Scotch.

Of course, it might not be. The calculations might have come out wrong, or it might be somehow avoided. But the stupefying dead weight of bleak pessimism let in no light. He dragged himself outside and slumped into the old battered chair and there he wept.

Some time near dawn, he became aware of the ringing phone. It was Drovecki.

“Paul, I’ve been trying to reach you for three hours. Listen, the numbers check out. I’ve had five different teams working this and it looks damn bad. We found some plates from last March that confirm the trajectory. We’re getting ready to hold a press conference, and…”

Rossetti’s knees buckled; he hit the green carpeted floor of his house with a thump, cradled his forehead, watched a viscous string of drool dangle downward. Through the phone he heard whining printers, ringing phones, anxious voices, shuffling papers. A room pregnant with the message that would change everything.

“Paul, are you still there?”

“Yeah.”

“I need to know, Paul, do you want your name on this thing? Because we can still take it off.”

This caught him off guard, pulled him straight up, stanched his tears. He glimpsed a brief but clear and potent mental image of the planetary ballet, Sun and Earth, Earth and Moon, Sun and Comet 1998 VII, all bowing and dancing exactly as they had ever been meant to dance, all spinning along their paths in arresting perfection. He saw a small tired man shivering in a canyon house near Prescott, Arizona, drooling on his phone as the rising sun colored the desert.

“Paul? … Paul?”

“Make it mine,” he said.

what’s the sexiest thing you ever saw in your life?

whoa! that’s a tough one. let’s see…. I guess… wow, what a question! nothing really jumps out at me. I don’t know. what’s the sexiest thing you every saw in your life?

you go first. I asked you first.

sure, but you already have an answer to the question, right?

she smiled a slow maybe-yes-maybe-no smile. it started bold and provocative, then melted into a shy friendly smile. she felt self-conscious and looked at the beer-wet napkin next to her glass. she tilted her head back slightly, lightly ran her fingers down her stretched neck; her second boyfriend had always said that drove him crazy. funny how these things stick with you. she looked back at him and considered his small frame, his boyish face. she wanted to reach across the table and touch his arm, but instead said:

maybe I do. but you have to answer my question first.

he tipped up his beer, drank. replaced it, looking past her down the empty twilit diner. she enjoyed putting him on the spot.

okay. I have an answer. the summer after my freshman year, I went to Amsterdam.

this should be good.

believe me, it wasn’t a wild trip. I was pretty straight-laced in those days. well, I still am, I guess. so no stories about women in the red light district or smoky hash bars or anything like that. I was in this big park called the Vondelpark one afternoon. I was there by myself, because the guy I was traveling with, this French guy named Henri, was getting on my nerves. he was constantly smoking these stinky Gaulois cigarettes and talking about Marlon Brando movies. he’d seen them all like 50 times. so I’m sitting there on one side of this little pond soaking up the afternoon sun, and this woman with short spiky blonde hair, very Euro, very Dutch, I guess, walks up to the other side of the pond, just across from me, right? and she puts down a blanket and sits down on it, and I’m thinking ‘you don’t suppose she’s going to take off her shirt?’ and sure enough she does. and she just sits there half-naked right there in front of me.

did you go talk to her?

right! I don’t even know if she spoke English. no, I didn’t go talk to her. it would’ve ruined it to talk to her. it was perfect just how it was. actually she wasn’t even that good-looking, in the magazine sense, I mean. she was sexy because she was just so matter-of-fact about it. she knew what she wanted to do, she didn’t care who saw, and that was that. one of the things that made it so great was the fact that I saw it coming just soon enough to have this moment of anticipation, of prediction, even. we never met eyes, but it was if there was some sort of connection there.

his eyes were shining now. he continued, nodding, I remember that very clearly… it was like an electric jolt went through me. I had never seen anything like it before. later on that same trip I went to places, Munich, Nice, where there were naked people just everywhere. you really only get that moment once, you know?

what happened, then?

that’s it — end of story. it’s not much of a story, after all. she just sat there enjoying the sun, and then, after maybe ten minutes the shade reached her, and she pulled on her shirt and left. okay, it’s your turn now. what’s your answer?

can you see my car from here?

what? he looked out at the old blue Mustang across the parking lot. yes… why?

stay here, she said, I’ll be back in a little bit. she stood up and walked out the door toward the car. disbelief mingled with the smell of the beer. he fiddled with the tip money, then squinted out the window again.

she strolled slowly to the car and took a long look around. his shadow shifted in the window where she had been sitting a minute ago. the late afternoon sun was in his eyes, but he could see her clearly enough, stepping into the front seat. she inhaled sharply and then pulled off her shirt, and after some small awkwardness removed her bra. the seat vinyl was still hot. she could feel his eyes on her, and she pictured his hand lying in his lap. he shifted his posture again.

she closed her eyes and listened to the sound of the cicadas. action at a distance. telepathic phone sex — hello, operator? give me Amsterdam, please. an excellent thing, the summer afternoon two-beer buzz. fun to imagine his throat dry, his heart pumping, his eyes straining. she tilted her head back and touched her neck lightly. her second boyfriend had been a rude son-of-a-bitch. she put her small bare feet up on the dashboard, well apart, and leaned back.

the grinding gravel of a walking car bent her quickly over the steering wheel. the car, black and predatory, was crawling across the lot into the spot next to hers. she hugged the steering wheel and started the engine even as she realized it was, in fact, a state trooper. she wheeled out of her spot, wondering what the trooper had seen, wondering if he would feel compelled to get back in his car and follow her. she was pulling past the front door of the diner gathering speed when her friend stumbled into the slanting sunlight looking dazed. she hit the brakes hard, reached across and threw open the passenger door. he looked at her, then at the approaching trooper, who was by now walking toward them. he looked at her again, his mouth beginning to form a wordless slow-motion question.

hop in, you big dummy! she called out. he hopped, and she accelerated, throwing gravel as she pulled onto the road. the trooper looked down the road and puzzled for a moment. his stomach growled longingly. he shook his head briefly and went inside, sat down and ordered a big slice of pecan pie and a cup of coffee. the seat he chose seemed unusually warm.

“Near the end of the last century, the art of marketing emerged from its crude mass-appeal beginnings to the highly networked point-market science we know today. The culmination of this historic trend was the appearance of the Personal Needs Technician (PNT), the so-called Pinto.”

— J. Ogilvy, Marketing in the 21st Century, Rand-Bismarck Publishing

Curiously, the promotion did not sit well. Which is not to say that Ellery Fox, database guru of the profitability department, did not deserve it. But he was deeply ambivalent about the extra money. Money means more freedom, more fun, right? But he knew that he quite honestly had money enough already — he had already left a much higher paying consulting job in New York to move west for the windsurfing. The religious guilt of his upbringing tugged at him fitfully. More money seemed to both confuse and thrill him.

More specifically he was annoyed the news was first delivered by his irritating former officemate Fleming. Stork-like and angular, Walter Fleming (affectionately known in the Profitability group as Phlegm) thought he was successfully concealing his envy, but he was in fact spilling it messily all over Fox’s carpet. “Pulled down the big promotion, eh? Well three cheers to you, big guy, heh-heh.” Here he made an abrupt and strangely aggressive toasting gesture, thrusting his stained coffee mug toward Fox. Fox managed a thin smile and watched the sloshing mug anxiously. Fleming continued, “I bet you get a Pinto for this.”

“Walter, you know that only the guys on the executive team get those. I don’t even want one. What the hell would I do with some glorified ad man chasing me around all day?”

Fleming raised an eyebrow and tipped his head toward Fox skeptically. Then came the maddening mechanical laugh: “Heh-heh. Yeah right, and I don’t want to be Bill Gates.” His head bent quickly and sipped from his agitated mug. “I bet you get one. Those guys can work wonders. Heh-heh.” And with that, Fleming poked his free hand into his pocket and ambled stiffly back into the hall.

“As a result of high-speed communications networks, point-of-sale identification infrastructure, and advanced neural prediction software, marketing experts had enough information to exactly predict the needs of their clientele. From this point, it was a simple jump to assign individual specialists, PNTs, to highly-compensated wage-earners. Freed from the horrendous expense of mass-targeted advertising, marketing money was channeled directly to Needs Technicians who expertly matched client income with corporate product.”

— J. Ogilvy, Marketing in the 21st Century

“I hope you don’t mind that I let myself in!” were the words that Peter Martinez, Personal Needs Technician, First Class, used to greet Ellery Fox on his arrival home that night. Fox, doubly stunned, was still standing in the doorway. Stunned once: this stranger, this bizarre marketing person whose arrival had been predicted by his co-worker, had broken into his house and re-arranged his living room. Stunned twice: the place looked great. All he could think to say to the affable man standing in the kitchen doorway was “Where did you find that Hokusai print?” This was in reference to a magnificent Japanese print tastefully framed and hanging over the mantel.

“Isn’t it great? I knew you wanted it. I’ve been doing my homework on you ever since I got the good news last month.”

“The good news?”

“Your promotion, silly! Human Resources automatically notifies the firm and gives us the necessary powers of attorney and so on. It’s all very pro forma.” He smiled brightly, brown eyes twinkling merrily and utterly without malice.

“You’ve known for a month…?” Fox’s voice trailed off in bafflement. He took in the scene: his computer was now atop the elegant maple desk he’d been considering buying for a year or more. The piles of magazines he’d been meaning to straighten up were neatly stacked. The floor was spotless. “Did you clean the place up too?”

“Oh, no no no. You see, I’m not a butler. I simply use your money to acquire the goods and services you’d get for yourself, in an ideal world. In this case, I arranged for a very pleasant young woman from the Philippines to clean the house Wednesdays.” He leaned forward and added significantly, “…that’s your soccer night.”

“I’d been planning to do that,” said Fox in a small wary voice.

“YES!” exclaimed Martinez, nodding vigorously, a fountain of good will, “of course you had! Don’t you see?”

As life became better and better for Ellery Fox, he became more and more miserable. There was no better illustration that his life was without meaning than the fact that his every desire could be pinpointed by the PNT firm within minutes of its coalescing in his brainstem. What depressed him even more was the fact that Martinez was always a step ahead of him, even when Fox was in a funk. Just when he would decide he needed a vacation to some remote island, Martinez would drop off tickets for a well-researched trip to the Galapagos. But then of course, he HAD always wanted to go to the Galapagos, and Martinez cheerfully reminded him there would be a partial eclipse of the sun while he was there. “Go ahead, you deserve it!” was the Pinto catch-phrase, and it echoed endlessly in Fox’s head.

So off he’d go to the Galapagos or the Upper Cascades or Katmandu, and somehow the more it was everything he’d hoped it would be, the more it depressed him. He had bleak visions of planning a suicide only to have Martinez appear at the last minute and offer the neatest, best-researched, and most tasteful exit strategy (“Go ahead, you deserve it!”). It was like being beaten to death by Martha Stewart.

One morning he found tickets to a New York Philharmonic performance of Beethoven’s 9th in his desk drawer at the exact instant that he had begun to hum it, and something snapped. He knew that if he rid himself of all his money, there would no longer be any economic logic to having a Pinto. Sell the house, move to the country, …

The phone rang; it was Martinez. “Great news!”

Fox cried “No, no more great news, Peter! You listen to me for once—”

Martinez continued without pausing, “I got a terrific price for your house, and I was able to cancel on the Beethoven concert. I’m sorry, what were you saying?”

From inside the scrubbed whitewashed walls of the old monastery, Ellery Fox contemplated with satisfaction the realities of his life of simple poverty. No more money, no more anxiety, only thin gruel in the morning and the daily rituals of devotion. Now he spent most of his time preparing for his mission work and chanting hymns in the name of infinite compassion. His physical and mental health would have been at a peak had it not been for a chance encounter in the temple courtyard. For there, walking serenely in the orange robes of a priest, was Peter Martinez.

“Peter,” Fox called out with a smile, “you’ve given it up, too, all that rat-race nonsense? Good for you!”

Martinez turned slowly and surveyed him with beatific calm. “What do you mean?” A quaking began in Fox’s knees and moved quickly into his thumping chest. “No no no, Ellery Fox! I still perform my mission work in the name of infinite compassion.”

“But… you never…” rasped Fox.

Martinez shined his smiling face on Fox. “Ellery, listen: Marx said that religion was the opiate of the masses. But he got it wrong.” His brown eyes glimmered with saintly benevolence; his white teeth gleamed. Fox was suddenly aware of a warm sense of bliss spreading across his chest. Martinez continued, “If you want to save the world, you need to use the right tools. Your mission time will come soon…” Martinez kept such good care of his teeth! “We’ve just gotten word that Fleming has received his promotion.”