Robert Tanenbaum - Enemy within

"Who?" said a voice after a considerable pause. A dog barked sharply, twice.

"Lucy."

"What?"

"I want to talk. Can I come in?"

Nothing. Lucy pulled back the door and entered. A small yellow mutt trotted up to her, sniffed her, and hopped back up to his master's side. The man was sitting cross-legged on the edge of a bed made out of baled newspaper, with a layer of orange finger-foam on top. A thin white man in his mid-thirties, he had a patchy tan beard and long, unwashed hair. He wore a mixture of military surplus and Vincent de Paul throwouts: OD fatigue pants, a flannel shirt, a gray wool sweater with ragged elbows, Adidas patched with duct tape. It was warm in the room, musty with the smell of dog, unwashed man, wood smoke, wet newspaper, cigarettes, and over all, the sweetish stink of the residues in the hundreds of aluminum cans, which, in bags and cartons, occupied half the volume of the dwelling. Hanging from the low ceiling and stuck in corners were hundreds of beautifully crafted ornaments made from tin cans-flowers, angels, animals, human figures. They jingled faintly in the slow air currents. Tools were lying neatly on a low brick-and-board table, with coils of wire and, more ominously, a large can of Hercules smokeless powder. Canman made booby traps to protect his gear from thieves. No one went into the paper house when Canman was gone from it.

The place was heated by a small stove made out of a washing-machine drum. It had a hood and pipes of scrap sheet metal and was swathed in pink fiberglass insulation and duct tape where it ran through the tepee roof, and a little door cut out of a car door, incorporating a single hinge. Like everything made by Canman, it was simple, elegant, perfectly functional. Light came from fat plumber's candles stuck in elaborate tin-can candlesticks, posed in niches carved into the paper walls. Lucy sat down on the floor, which was thick with industrial-carpet remnants.

"Make yourself at home, why don't you," said the man without looking at her. He was working with a long knife and a pair of pliers on a device he held in his lap.

"What are you doing?" she asked to break the silence.

"What does it look like?"

"You're fixing your can crusher."

"Yeah, and if you knew that, why did you ask?"

"I was making conversation. I was being social."

The man snipped off a piece of wire and glared at her. He mugged looking around the room. "Uh, man's living in a place like this, what makes you think he wants to bullshit with people? Go home!"

"I'm concerned about you."

"Not my problem. Go away!"

"You're feeling better, I guess."

The man picked up his knife and pointed it at her. "Hey, look. I was flat on my back last month, you brought me juice and aspirin, you walked Maggie. I didn't ask you to, and it doesn't mean you own a piece of me either. I don't need your soup. You want for the aspirin and the juice? Take some cans. You want money. Here!" He pulled a few greasy bills out of a pocket and flung them at her. The dog growled.

She did not touch them. "Real Ali says you're running scared."

"He does, huh? Real Ali should mind his own fucking business. This is why I got to fucking get out of this slum. I came here, built my place, it was nice and peaceful, everybody was living down at the station, fucking beggars. Now it's wall-to-wall crazy people. It's like Times fucking Square here."

"It seems a shame to leave here now you've got it fixed up so nice."

"See, that's what you don't understand. I don't need this. I got a knife, a pliers, a snips. I got a hand-baler and a can crusher and my wagon. I could put a place like this together in two days, if I got the paper and the plastic. The stove takes down, but I got a better idea for one, make it out of a muffler and exhaust pipes. A smaller place, someplace quiet, just big enough for one. Build it like an igloo. Get away from these crazies."

"Then why don't you hang out with sane people, have a real life? You're smart. You read." She gestured to a double row of paperbacks sitting in a milk crate. "You can make things, fix things. You're a terrific artist. You could get those can sculptures in a gallery…"

"Sane people? Where? Wall Street? The government? Corporations? You think those people are sane? They're nuttier than Fake Ali out there. There's no fucking difference between what you hear on the news and what Lila Sue spits out. You think that's an improvement, being a slave to crazy people, wrecking the planet, turning everything into cash to buy shit they throw away? Don't even know they're crazy. Which is as crazy as you can get. You want me to hang with sane people? Find me three. Two."

"I'm sane."

"Ho! You believe angels talk to you. Jesus rose from the dead."

"What do you believe in, John?" she asked mildly.

"Me? This!" He held up his knife. It was a military knife of some kind, shiny and pointed. "I believe this is a knife." He scratched the mutt behind her ear. "I believe this is a dog. I believe life is a pile of shit and the world would be a better place if more people were dead. Especially those pathetic loonies and hypes you hang out with."

He put the can crusher down on the floor and began fumbling through his pockets, his face twitching, cursing under his breath. A baggie of pale tan pills appeared. He grinned and held it out to the girl. "Join me?"

"Maybe later."

A snort, and he ate two of the Percodans, swallowing them dry. "Maybe later," he said derisively. "You know if Jesus was hanging around nowadays, he'd be into everything, hanging around with the lowlife. I thought you were trying to be like him."

"I doubt Jesus would be a doper, John. He was always casting out unclean spirits."

"Yeah? Well, I don't have any of them." He lay back down on his bed and flung an arm across his eyes.

"Actually, you do," she said, but in a low voice. She stood up and retrieved a felt pen from her bag. She wrote her name and phone number on the newspaper wall. "If you're going to leave here, I wish you'd tell Real Ali where you're going. And I left you my number. Call me if you need anything."

"I need you to get lost."

The frog person was explaining Rule 174 of The Securities Act, and Marlene was drawing tiny linked roses on her yellow pad, as she had done when bored, starting with her days at Holy Family parochial school in Ozone Park, Queens, and continuing through Sacred Heart, Smith, Yale Law, and the district attorney's office. Had she kept all of them, she could have run a garland from New York to San Diego, for she was often bored, in the way good soldiers are bored between battles. Rule 174 governed the quiet-period phase of the complex train of events that places a private company's stock before the public, the so-called initial public offering, the IPO, which, Marlene believed, is what the nineties had instead of really good rock and roll.

Marlene was not interested in the quiet period, or any other period within the purview of the Frog Person, who was the man from the underwriters, Kohlmann Mohl Hastings. His name was Foster Amory, and Marlene had uncharitably focused her resentment at the whole process upon him, for he was the man responsible for Sherpa-ing the Osborne International IPO up the stormy rock face of infinite wealth. His eye fell upon her and she shot him a glare that made him look away. Marlene felt a pang of guilt. It was not his fault that her colleagues had turned into appalling greed-heads overnight. Or that he really did look like a frog.

The general purpose of Rule 174, Marlene gathered through the roses, was to prevent firms about to unleash stock from hyping the stock. Were it not for this rule, some unscrupulous businesspeople might tell lies about their firm's prospects or tell things to some people they did not tell to everyone. The Frog Person now paused, and his song was taken up by William Bell, Osborne's general counsel, more of a bird than a frog: a crane or a stork. He had sandy hair, watering blue eyes, and glasses that he had constantly to push back on his long, pointed, redtipped nose. Marlene called him Ding-dong Bell, although he had never been anything but nice to her and was not notably nuts, except about this IPO, a pathology he shared with everyone else around the table except, apparently, Marlene.