David Wallace - Broom of the System

“Stop trying to pin me, Rick. I feel like a butterfly on a board.”

“But if such a propensity-to-pin is a feature of me, then you must love that feature, if there’s been the reversal.”

“I guess I’m not saying it right. I’d really rather not do this now. I feel all public, saying this stuff.”

“What about, for example, Lang? Do you suppose a Lang-love involves a reversal? Does a Lang ever stop loving on the basis of features and qualities?”

“Especially don’t want to talk about him, OK?”

“Why not?”

“….”

“Don’t just grit your teeth, tell me why not. It’s vital that I know, and surely you see why.”

“No, Rick, I don’t.”

“Why, if the reversal issue remains ambiguous, how am I to feel about you and me and, for instance, just to take an instance, Lang? For here we have, in Lang, a male creature surely far more worthy of love than I, features-wise, if we’re to be objective. Tall, feet easily reaching bar-stool supports, wincingly handsome, easy, loose, mildly funny, widely travelled, wildly wealthy, muscular, intelligent, though in my perception not threateningly so…”

“….”

“And in uncountably many other respects features-love-deserving, Lenore. I’ve been in a men’s room with the man. Do you hear me? I’ve been in a men’s room with the man.”

“I feel like bundling you into the car and rushing you to Dr. Jay’s right this minute. I think new plateaus of spasmodic weirdness are being reached.”

“I must know things, Lenore. You must begin to tell me things, or 1-will implode. I must know whether I have effected the reversal in you. I must know how Lang fits in.”

“What does fitting in have to do with anything?”

“I must know. Lang doesn’t even know whether you remember him or not. He expressed doubts and anxieties on the plane, to me, while you were into your twentieth consecutive hour of sleep.”

“Oh I remember him all right. Don’t worry about my not remembering him.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“I really just don’t want to talk about it. What are you, trying to sell him to me or something? I just would rather not discuss it, and a feature I’d love to see in you right now would be your not wanting to discuss things I don’t want to discuss.”

“The next sound you hear will be that of implosion. Say I’ve effected the reversal in you, Lenore. Please.”

“There a towel around here?”

“No showers, until you tell me things. I’ll do something to the water main.”

“Look, Lang’s a big reason why I got my whole family really mad at me by not going to Mount Holyoke, OK? The time I visited, he and this other guy, with an adolescent, Amish, armpitty beard, came and barged in and banged their heads on the wall and made people sign on their bottoms, bare, and Lang practically molested Mindy Metalman on the spot.”

“They’re married, now, you know.”

“I heard you two talking about it at the Aqua Vitae, Rick. I heard. I heard everything you guys said, when I wasn’t busy keeping Stoney’s head from plopping into his pizza.”

“So there’s been a reverse reversal with Lang. You anti-love him, in the face of all the features that seem to cry out for and necessitate love. And yet through the reversal you love a man approximately one twentieth the man he is…”

“You want to know what I really definitely don’t love? I don’t love this sick obsession with measuring, and demanding that things be said, and pinning, and having, and telling. It’s all one big boiling spasm that makes me more than a little ill, not to mention depressed.”

“So you don’t love me, after all.”

“Maybe I’ll just go down to Atlanta and be with Vlad the Impaler and get my royalty checks while you soak your head for like the next month, OK?”

“….”

“What do you need him for, anyway? What’s his function in all this?”

“Translation, I told you.”

“Norslan herbicide stuff into idiomatic modem Greek? That makes no sense at all.”

“Unfortunately, we’re not always in control of the decisions on the basis of which business is conducted, life lived.”

“How encouraging. But why him? You met him in a bar, is all. Cleveland must be crawling with actual Greeks, from Greece, if you want stuff translated.”

“I’m really not sure why. There are affinities: Amherst, fraternity, the Scarsdale connection. But something… I simply felt… I don’t know how to describe it. That was a strange day.”

“You’re making no sense at all.”

“Please note that what we have here is an inability, rather than an unwillingness, to tell.”

“I just think it will be weird to have him at Frequent and Vigorous. He’s just going to add to the chaos. Walinda will be retroactively on the ceiling about my being gone, once you’re upstairs, and plus Candy was dropping ominous hints about the phone situation.”

“More than a hint-matter, I’m afraid. One of my tasks at the office while you and Lang were ostensibly settling in was to check phones. The story is not a happy one.”

“What do you mean, ‘ostensibly’ settling in? Did 1 detect a tone?”

“I was referring to the unexpected and troubling Vlad matter.”

“Oh.”

“….”

“If poor Vern’s been working double shifts to cover for me, he must not even have a stomach left. You really ought to hire somebody extra, at least to cover, at least while the phone deal is the same.”

“From the payphone near the Cleaveland skeleton, I was in communication with a Mr. Sludgeman at Interactive Cable. He promises the very promptest possible action.”

“I think it’s possible to be prompter than eight days, which is what it’s been. I don’t see what kind of phone company-lets all its tunnel people go off fishing or wherever just when there’s a hideous tunnel problem. And that guy who looks like a negative, who refuses to do tunnels, and says tunnels are nerves, is about zero help.”

“Mr. Sludgeman claims new avenues are being explored. Highly sensitive equipment is being rented, to be brought to bear on the tunnel below the Bombardini Building. Sludgeman alleges the locus of the problem has been identified as Erieview Plaza.”

“Super. Just not at all thrilled about the prospect of answering Den of Pain calls for the next six months.”

“Which brings us to the really central issue of the night.”

“Rick, sleepiness is shooting out of every pore in my body.”

“No chance you’d want to hear a story, then.”

“Time just doesn’t seem right, somehow.”

“A number of interesting ones on my desk right now.”

“….”

“For instance, a man is completly faithful to his wife, but only because he is impotent with all of the truly staggering number of women he tries to be unfaithful with, although he is not at all impotent with the wife. We’re invited to speculate about whether he’s a good man, or a bad man, deep down. Interested?”

“Not… pretty sleepy.”

“You don’t enjoy stories anymore?”

“That’s not it. You do awesome… stories. I’m just either going to sleep or die, here.”

“Well, you may or may not be interested to know…”

“Fffnoof.”

“… that I’ve had a not insignificant inspiration.”

“….”

“Bearing directly on you.”

“Fnoof.”

“And so of course on me.”

“….”

“What an anticlimax.”

/a/

At the Frequent and Vigorous/Bombardini Company switchboard at 10 A.M. on Wednesday were Lenore Beadsman, Candy Mandible, Judith Prietht. Under the switchboard counter, with only his boots visible in the cubicle, was Peter Abbott. Just leaving was an anonymous delivery boy, having delivered to Lenore an enormous enclosing wreath of flowers, red-and-white roses arranged in an interlocking Yin and Yang. The wreath sat atop the switchboard wastebasket, being too big to fit inside. Definitely in the wastebasket, though, was the note that had come with the flowers: “Miss Beadsman. Time grows short. One way or the other you will be part of me.”