David Wallace - Broom of the System

“So I keep getting told. Even though the girl herself owns this wild-ass bird that’s gonna be on religious TV, with padre Sykes, who’s my own personal Daddy’s favorite.” Lang held up a bandaged finger. “Little Fucker damn near took my digit off, yesterday.”

“You were at Lenore’s house, with her bird?”

Lang stared silently at Obstat.

“Well, we know all about the bird thing,” Obstat said, looking away and shaking his head. “We’re shitting all kinds of different bricks over that one. We think what happened was this relative who got us going on the project slipped the thing a pineal mickey. Which means maybe they’re going around slipping it all over the place. Which means other companies could get hold of it. Which has the Chief shitting bricks, believe you me — that along with the fact that the retards in Jars have made something like three times as many jars as we need, or have lids for, even, so the Chief has to try to sell some jars to this chain of medical laboratories, and he‘s—”

“This crap can make animals talk?” Lang interrupted.

“Well, our understanding is the bird doesn’t talk, so much as just repeat.”

“… remember Candy did say something about that.”

“Who?”

“They got peanuts in this bar, at all?”, Lang said. They both looked around. “What kind of self-respectin’ bar doesn’t have peanuts?”

“Coconut I know they’ve got. It’s a mood place.”

“Shit on fire.”

“But anyway we don’t really know what it can do. You ought to hear some of these kids. They can sing like birds.”

“Some joke.”

“No pun intended.”

Lang stared absently into Ginger’s décolletage. “So she’s hot, then, and things with her Daddy aren’t too good.”

“My impression is they aren’t close at all.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Listen, you want to see a picture of her?” Obstat dug for his wallet in the back pocket of his Chinos.

“I know what she looks like,” Lang said. Then he looked up at Obstat in surprise. “You carry her picture?”

“The little lady has smitten me from afar, since way back who knows when,” Obstat said, shaking his head and flipping through his credit cards. “I admit it’s a pitiful situation.”

“This an old picture you got?”

“High school yearbook.”

“Give it here, then.”

Obstat handed over the little wallet photo. In the picture Lenore was sixteen. Her hair was very long. She was smiling broadly, looking off into the nothing reserved especially for yearbook photos.

Lang stared down at the picture. He brushed away a bit of beer foam from the border with a thumb. Lenore smiled at him, through him.

“Looks to be her, all right.”

Obstat was bouncing up and down in his seat. “Listen, stay a few more minutes. It’ll be time for another gag in a while. And have a look at that one over there, at Mary-Ann, with the little guy in the beard and steamed glasses. Looks a little spacey, but talk about your basic gazongas.”

Lang kept looking at the photo. He seemed to be about to say something.

/e/

“Maybe even inclined to say big mistake here, Rick.”

“Don’t be silly. It’s an absolute inspiration. I was positively writhing with excitement at the prospect of telling you, last night. And then of course you conked out. Again.”

“But I like the switchboard. You know that. And it even looks like the lines are going to get fixed soon. They’re going to do tests.”

“Lenore, you are in a position to do me a favor. Actually to help both of us, I think. This will be deeply interesting, I promise. I’ve seen that you’re chafing, at the switchboard, deep down.”

“Beg pardon?”

“You can save me valuable weeding-time.”

“How can Norslan translations take so much time? That’s not a long thing.”

“….”

“And what’s with the light in here right now? This is creepy.”

“Frigging shadow…”

“We need to have a serious talk about the windows in the lobby, too, mister. I’m starting not to care one bit for the way the—”

“Come here a moment. See the way the lake looks like rotten mayonnaise in the shadow-half of the window? Doesn’t that look like rotten mayonnaise?”

“Oh, that’s just sick.”

“But doesn’t it?”

“It really does.”

“I thought so.”

“OK, so what does this involve, then?”

“What?”

“This hopefully very temporary Review job.”

“It simply involves screening a portion of the back submissions to the quarterly, for a time, the time I’m to be frantically busy with the herbicide thing. You’ll be weeding out the more obviously pathetic or inappropriate submissions, and putting asterisks on those that strike you as meriting particular attention and consideration on my part.”

“Hmm.”

“We’ll need to make sure your tastes are keened to the proper pitch for our particular publication, of course…”

“You’re going to keen the pitch of my tastes?”

“Relax. I’m simply going to have you read briefly through a batch I’ve already exposed myself to, and we’ll just see what happens, taste-pitch-wise. You’ll be having a preliminary look at… these.”

“All those are submissions?”

“I shall say that most are. Some few might for all you know have been sent to me by friends for scrutiny and criticism. But I’ve effaced all names.”

“So it’s not all just troubled-college-student stuff?”

“The bulk of it is, to my ever-increasing irritation and distress. But the average collegiate material you should be able to spot a mile off.”

“How come?”

“Oh, dear, many reasons.”

“….“

“What shall we say? Perhaps that it tends to be hideously self-conscious. Mordantly cynical. Or, if not mordantly cynical, then simperingly naive. Or at any rate consistently, off-puttingly pretentious. Not to mention abysmally typed, of course.”

“….”

“It tries too hard, is really all we can say about most of it. There is simply an overwhelming sense of trying too hard. My, you’re looking particularly lovely in this half of the light.”

“Rick, how am I supposed to know if something’s mordant, or simpering? I don’t know anything about literature.”

“A, the vast majority of the material that passes through here is not even potentially literature, and b, good!”

“What’s good?”

“That you ‘know nothing about literature,’ or at least believe that you don’t. It means you’re perfect: fresh, intuitive, shaking the aesthetic chaff out of your hair…”

“There’s something in my hair?”

“It’s when people begin to fancy that they actually know something about literature that they cease to be literarily interesting, or even of any use to those who are. You’re perfect, take it from me.”

“I don’t know…”

“Lenore, what’s with you? Isn’t this the person who sees herself as almost by definition a word person? Who snarls when her literary sensibility is even potentially impugned?”

“I just want to try to keep my personal life and my job as separate as I can. I don’t need Walinda going around saying I got a cushy deal because of you.”

“But here’s your chance to be out of Walinda-range for whole periods of time.”

“And plus, Rick, I just have a bad feeling about the whole thing.”

“Trust me. Help me. Look, let’s take a couple of examples. How about this pathetically typed little item right here? Why don’t you just read the very first bit of it, here, and we’ll…”

“This one?”

“Yes.”

“Let’s see: ‘Dr. Rudolph Carp, one of the world’s leading proc tologists, was doing a standard exam one warm July morning when he suddenly remembered that he had forgotten to put on an examination glove. He looked down with horror at…’—oh, gak.”