Robert Tanenbaum - Resolved

"Well, see? Physical pain can block it for a while, as can pleasure, which is why they sell so much heroin. And that's all I want to say about it."

She wormed closer and slid the laptop to the floor. "So, could you render me unconscious right now?"

"We're fresh out of heroin."

"Use your mouth, then," she said.

Why don't they cancel this goddamn thing, Murrow thought again, looking out the window into what seemed a wall of grits, so thick was the fall of snow. He also thought, This is what hell is going to be like, trapped in a room, waiting for an event indefinitely postponed, with someone very much like Ariadne Stupenagel. He wished fervently that he had been a better man heretofore, and instantly resolved upon the reform of his character. He glanced upward past the window to the ceiling, its pipe, its sprinkler head, and the sprinkler head's new decoration, a pair of lacy lavender silk panties. It had only taken her two tries. Murrow wondered whether Karp would hold him responsible for this. Probably. He tried to estimate whether, if they moved the desk and Karp stood upon it, and upon, say, three volumes of the Criminal Code, he could reach it and pull it down. Drunk. Falling, breaking his neck. The scandal…

The demon reporter was slouched in Karp's big chair. She was facing the window, muttering and swinging her big bottle like a metronome, clunking it dully at the end of each stroke against Karp's desk. A maddening sound. Every dozen or so beats the bottle would rise into sight and then vanish again as she drank a slug, and then clunk, clunk.

Impelled to speak by the Sartrean horror of the moment, Murrow said, "They're going to have to cancel this."

The chair spun around. She pointed the champagne's snout at him like a shotgun. "That's where you're wrong, my son. They'll never cancel this, not if a fucking glacier came down from the Catskills and buried the Bronx. The gov can't be seen to be stopped by a little snow. It would make his little willy seem smaller than the willy of the mayor, and that would never do. Ninety percent of American politics is about who has the biggest willy. And there's another reason." She looked stupidly at the mouth of the bottle for a moment as if the other reason dwelt there, and then stuck it into her own mouth.

"What reason?"

"Ah," she said, "that would be telling. See the way it works is I ask you and you tell me and then you read all about it. But here's a hint: how could they possibly have picked a situation that would get this event less publicity than holding it on a Friday afternoon the week before Christmas. Okay, they didn't order the storm, but since they have it, they for sure ain't going to waste it. This party is destined for page eleven below the fold, and not even local TV coverage."

"They didn't want to publicize it."

"No, and that's why I'm here. You would be surprised at how many good stories start at events no one is supposed to go to. Embassy cocktail parties thrown by second-rate countries. Unveilings of statues of national poets no one's ever heard of. Friday afternoon coronations of obscure legal bureaucrats."

"But why?"

The answer to this was a snicker. The chair swiveled back until the reporter faced the window. The champagne bottle swung and clunked against the desk. A shadow appeared in the glass of the door. Murrow felt a pulse of relief at Karp's return, until he noted that the shadow wasn't nearly tall enough. The door opened and in walked a small elderly man swathed in a fur-collared overcoat and a fur hat, both thickly encrusted with snow. The man brushed this off and looked around Karp's office owlishly. He did not fail to notice the panties on the sprinkler or that the long, booted legs reflected in the window pane did not belong to Butch Karp.

"You look like you been having a party," he said. "Where is everybody?"

The chair swiveled. "Oh, Guma," said the reporter. "Did you bring anything to drink?"

"What a question!" said Ray Guma, drawing from the deep pockets of his overcoat two unopened fifths of Teacher's scotch.

"What've you been up to, Guma?" asked Stupenagel. Her glass, which had held cognac and champagne, now was half full of scotch. She held it up to the cold light of the ceiling fixture to check for insects and other floaters, a habit born in the third world, where the scotch is often not what it should be.

"Dying," said Guma. "They tell me it's in remission now, but meanwhile I got about twelve inches of gut left and I'm missing half the accessories."

"Oh, spare us the details! To tell you the absolute truth, I thought you were dead already."

"To tell you the absolute truth, I am," said Guma. Murrow could believe it. He had heard stories of Guma's exploits in the old days, and it was hard to credit them to the withered man hunched in his coat on the couch, who had once been infamous as the Mad Dog of Centre Street. He looked like the mummy of a monkey, although his eyes still glowed with a calculating intelligence.

"I'm like in that Christmas carol movie, the ghost of Christmas past," Guma continued. "I hope you've been good, Stupenagel."

"Very, but not through any fault of my own. Being bad has fallen out of fashion, I think."

After a moment's reflection, Guma said, "You know, Stupenagel, you really broke my heart back there when I was jumping your bones. I really thought we had something."

"We did have something, Goom. You had information I wanted, and I had a warm body and we exchanged, quid pro fucking quo."

"No, just come out and say it," said Guma. "You don't have to let me down easy."

Another snorting laugh from Stupenagel. Murrow looked at the two of them and tried to keep the horror off his face, as he envisioned this pair going at it. Where was Karp? Murrow discovered that he had a glass of whiskey in his hand. He definitely did not want to drink anymore. Guma and Stupenagel seemed to have forgotten him. They were talking companionably about events of some years back, when they had apparently had their inconceivable fling. Stupenagel was saying, "Yeah, I spent time in Guatemala, in India, in Mexico, in Argentina, in fucking Sudan, all places where beating up the press is practically like a requirement for promotion in the police, and I didn't get a scratch. I come home to the land of the free and what happens? I get pounded to shit by a corrupt cop. No wonder I drink."

Murrow slipped out like a ferret and went straight to the men's room. He dumped the scotch down the sink and used the glass to drink tap water, as much as he could hold, a trick his mother had recommended as a way to flush the toxins from the system and avoid a hangover. As he did so, he could not help noticing an almost operatic performance from the last toilet stall. Someone was, as they used to say in his prep school, blowing lunch, although it sounded like breakfast, too, and the dinner from the night before. He waited, and was not entirely surprised when Karp emerged.

"Well, that was fun," said Karp when he saw his underling. "Care to join me in a puke?"

"No, I'm a diluter, not an expeller," Murrow said, holding up a glass of New York's purest. "How do you feel?"

"Like a street person has been living in my oral cavity. Can I borrow your glass? Dilution sounds good."

Murrow looked on in wonder as Karp drank. After a long while he said, "Croton Reservoir's on the phone, boss. They're hearing sucking noises and they'd like you to cut back a little."

Karp laughed briefly, put down the glass, and washed his face. "Tell me, Murrow, do you do this often?"

"Not that much anymore. But I did, nearly every weekend, from about age seventeen to a couple of years ago."

"May I ask why?"

"Oh, I guess sex was a lot of it, it helps in going to bed with people you shouldn't really go to bed with. And blessed amnesia, relaxation of every moral code, tolerating boring, stupid people- the usual. And habit. I grew up with parents who drank martinis at five-thirty, every single day."