Jess Walter - The Financial Lives Of the Poets

nies and villains and fuck-sticks in the world. As Righteous Randy might say, I am the Light and the Dark.

From now on I will answer every phone call from a telephone solicitor with purpose-No, I don’t need a new long distance provider, but would you like to buy a spliff? I think of the assholes I meet every week-snooty waiters and people who park in handicapped spots and all the arrogant, selfish, lying cheats. I can bring them all down, one by one.

I’ll do my homework: research the most calloused bosses, inept congressmen, corrupt bankers, greedy brokers, predatory lenders. I’ll drive my Nissan to Detroit and sell to the auto company CEOs and I’ll go to New York and sell weed to that asshole trader I heard on NPR and to the dipshit investment bankers who broke our financial system through their unchecked greed, the lousy ass-ticks who told us all to give them our money, to vote for them, to trust them, guys who said the markets would regulate themselves, that the world was fair.

I sit in revved-up silence in my car, outside the boys’ school, my own breathing deafening. Hands shake. I feel flushed. Mind racing, I’m having conversations I can’t track with myself, offering justifications and pleadings. I want to sleep, preferably next to my wife, and I wonder what she’s doing now. Sitting at her desk at the stupid optometrist’s office, staring into space, thinking of… him? God, I wish Chuck was a pot smoker. How much easier would that be? I happen to look up to see Elijah Fenton’s dad, Carl, walking past the line of waiting cars toward the school. The guy wears a softball jacket with the name of his paving and concrete company on it, as if he’s taunting jobless losers like me with the fact that he still has a company and that his company still has a softball team-the arrogance of the employed! No doubt made aware of my son’s unprovoked clacker aggression, Carl Fenton shoots me what can only be described as a threatening glare. Is there any way the

guy really made out with the second-grade fertility goddess, Ms. Bishop? Who knows? All I know is that next week we’ll find out if Mr. Carl Fenton wants to buy a reefer. Oh, and there’s Nicholas Rowe-he of the T-Ball prodigy son, Caleb-Nick Rowe who famously cut second graders from the second-grade T-Ball team because he feared their lack of coordination might affect his son’s draft status a decade from now. (Ten point bonus, that.) A long shot, of course, but perhaps he’d like some weed.

Beyond all these deserving targets, I wonder if I can find my own eighth-grade baseball coach, Mr. Stepney, or Tina Sprat, the girl who refused to kiss me after I spent sixty dollars on dinner before a Sadie Hawkins dance my sophomore year, or the guy in college, what was his name-Yalden!-who sold me that Chevy Luv pickup with the cracked block. Or…or…

I snap awake.

Was I sleeping?

School is out.

Kids drift to waiting cars.

The doors open. Franklin and Teddy climb in the backseat.

“He-e-ey.” I try to not sound crazy but my voice goes up and down the register. I can’t stop blinking. “H-h-how was school?” Why is my voice doing that? I’m cracking. Nervous breakdown? Anxiety attack?

“Fine,” Teddy mumbles.

“Great!” says Franklin.

“Great? Really?” I turn to see Franklin’s big earnest eyes. “What happened?”

Franklin shrugs. “Nothing. It was just a great day. I love Fridays.”

I laugh again. And then a whimper, a kind of weep seeps from me, from some deep cavity. I can’t say why Franklin’s great day causes me to whimper-maybe the eight-year-old in me recalls

that nothing has to happen for a day to be great. And then it feels as if this broken thing in my chest cracks like an ice dam, and begins sliding up into my throat. I happen to glance down and see the glowing watch around my wrist. Shit. I forgot to press the stop button after my meeting with M-. The voice activation has presumably kicked in.

I imagine the transcript:

CI OH-2: “He-e-ey! How was school?”

Unidentified Juvenile Male 1: (Unintelligible)

Unidentified Juvenile Male 2: “Great.”

CI OH-2: “Great? Really? What happened?”

Unidentified Juvenile Male 2: “Nothing. It was just great. I love Fridays.”

CI OH-2: (Unintelligible, possibly maniacal laugh-cry-whimper as if he’s snapping, unraveled beyond recognition)

“You okay, Dad?”

I press the wind-button on the watch. The backlight goes out. “Fine, Teddy.”

“Elijah Fenton and I are friends again,” Franklin says.

“Did you apologize to him?”

“I didn’t have to.” Franklin shrugs. “He didn’t say anything about it.”

Something parental I should say here, something about responsibility or contrition, what’s the word…the other side of forgiveness…aw hell…I can’t come up with it.

So I concentrate on the road. Drive now; parent later.

I squint. It’s cleared up again this afternoon, the cool winter fog keeps burning off, leaving no place to hide, and the crisp air throws me; the world is washed out, shimmery. Like a twenty-degree desert. Tree limbs crook accusingly in the wind, and leaves

leap at our passing. I can see deep into the cars around me, and it’s like looking into people’s souls. We round the corner to our house, I’m still shaking, breathing shallow and raspy. We crawl down our block, limp into the driveway.

How is it that I keep forgetting that my front yard is full of lumber?

“Wow,” says Teddy. “What’s all the wood for?”

“That…was a mistake,” I say. “They’re coming to get it tomorrow. They delivered it to the wrong house.”

“The wrong house?” Teddy asks. “That’s too bad.”

Kid, you have no idea.

“It looks like Jenga,” says Franklin.

And this causes me to start crying again. It was Franklin’s favorite game a couple of years ago, Jenga. We played every night before I tucked him into his little bed, his feet curled up beneath him. I stare at the beams in my front yard, stacked crosswise, and it comes to me that life is a version of that children’s game: pull one from the bottom and stack it on top and try to keep the whole thing from falling. Slide a board out, stack it on top, the structure growing taller as the weight shifts upward, until the base begins to look like lattice, and pretty soon you realize you’re holding your breath, that there are no more safe moves, but still you must try, always try, because that’s the game…so you look for a board to slide, gently…slide…gently…even though you can never win, and it’s always the same…breathless and tentative…the world teetering above your head.

SLURRED SPEECH, STUTTERING OR speaking in monotone

lapses in judgment and trouble with visual recognition

a loss of impulse control, dizziness, nausea and

erratic behavior, along with severe disorientation

all caused by a steep decline in neural activity

which can lead eventually to severe hallucinations

delirium, delusions, manias, even psychotic breaks-

then death-

Then death? Wait. Just like that? Shit. I reread the Wikipedia sleep deprivation article to see if I missed something. A few days without sleep and you go from slurred speech to bad decisions to…death? Well, that hardly seems fair. It feels like they left out a few steps…like they skipped second and third base…went straight from kissing to a greasy threesome. I read deeper into the article: the longest anyone has willingly gone without sleep was eleven days-some college student in 1965-but because of the health dangers, the Guinness World Records has stopped recognizing lack of sleep as a legitimate record. Meanwhile, there are all sorts of folk stories about people going years without sleep. My favorite is a guy in Vietnam who claims to have gone thirty years.