Jacob Rubin - The Poser

“You can talk about it all you want. Just don’t do it anywhere near me.” I nodded to Frankie and Lou. Soon enough they got him in a grip, hoisting him up like professional movers. It was right out of a Harry Knott film.

“Hey, hey, c’mon.” He seemed to be in his natural state, getting thrown out. “Your dad wouldn’t approve of this, I’ll tell you that.”

“What?” Too quick. “My father?”

Looking at each other and then at me, Frankie and Lou understood to release him. Unheim, once seated, made a gloating expression. “Thought that might perk you up.” He propped his right foot on his left knee. How he used to sit in detention. “Might a big wheel such as yourself rate it a tale worth paying for?”

“I see you have more to say.” It was like being on set: you had to deliver each line slower than you thought. “I don’t have my book with me. But you have my word that if you give me accurate information about my father, I will pay you eight thousand dollars.”

He nodded, frowned. “See, he was in Dun Harbor when I was coming up. Helped me get in with some of the guys there. He talked about it — how the old lady threw him out after his first bid.

“For some guys, really, it ain’t the money at all. It’s like the thing food does to a bitch. Lifting someone’s wheels. Juicing a candy bar. ‘They a-call to me,’ he used to say. Smart enough, but he was one of those guys — only one kind of luck, right? First, it was the horse he got caught smuggling in. That’s what lost him the gig with the longshoremen. After that, he got wrapped up in an insurance scam at the dock with guys he used to work with. Arson. He torched the office and old storage house like he was supposed to, but two teens were having a time down there, and they got torched with it. Sentenced to thirty years at Dun Harbor.”

“The prison?” That dismal building. I pictured a visiting room lined with picnic tables. A handcuffed figure in a tux shuffling through the door.

“Oh yeah,” he said. “Stole some fucker’s cigs, apparently, fifteen years in. Got his throat cut. I brought you up once. Told him about some of the shit you got into, about detention. He said, ‘He even worse than me.’” This bad Italian accent stolen from radio ads for spaghetti sauce — that was as close as I would get to my father’s voice. “Check or cash,” Unheim said. “Either way.”

I made sure not to rush it. “If you think my mother owes you money, you ought to take it up with her. As for me, I think your story’s worth about as much as the teller.”

Lou and Frankie lifted him again.

“Big head now, I got it. I heard you had to sleep with a muzzle on, that true? You fucking cunt. I heard your mom wore earplugs around you, so she couldn’t hear you, cunt.” Dragged outside, he continued to yell, his boot heels scraping the ground.

• • •

Inside Nathan Sharp’s ballroom the fifty guests inspected me over duck and Bordeaux. These fund-raisers required little of me except to seem amused by the donors’ jokes or improved by their advice. From the swamps in the southeast and the windy states to the north they had been drawn to this mansion. I stepped out for a smoke and saw their shiny cars in a ring. Behind them the ocean rumbled in the starless night.

Fantasma Falls was a misnomer. There were no known falls yet found in a terrain marked for miles by desert, coastline, and canyon. According to one version, the title was the outright invention of Rutger Smitt, a paper baron, landowner, and amateur versifier from the previous century. Smitt, it was said, scoured the Dictionary of Geographic Terms , concocting the most alluring names he could to ease the settling of a land considered mean if not downright uninhabitable. Something of a pioneer in the field of branding, he was rumored to have coined the name Joy Beach, a waterless dump twenty miles north of the city, and Hallowed Hills, a stretch of accursed flatland to the east. Others, though, insisted the name preceded Smitt’s arrival and could be traced back to the slaughtered native population, who twice a year had visited a magical falls where ghosts were believed to take the shapes of men in order to reenact the scenes of their death. A committed minority held firmly to this latter view and were known to go on long hikes and walkabouts in the summer, searching for these still-undiscovered falls.

After dinner we retired to Nathan’s den, where Bernard had me do a show. A southerner bravely raised his hand. Next, a real-estate magnate named Gerald Picaso. The laughter stoked in that smoky, paneled room, decorated with the murdered heads of bears and moose, grew like a blaze, the faces of clannish men gathered around it, grinning and covetous. “This one’s our s!” a fat man said to much applause.

After dinner, Max pulled me aside, into an alcove decorated with paintings of flamingos.

“Do you believe any of it?”

“What’s that?” I said.

“All these speeches you give.”

“I don’t care what I do.”

“You know your mom and I talk. She doesn’t like this one bit. Not one bit !”

Soon after my encounter with Jesse Unheim I had Frankie and Lou look into Jesse’s claims about my father. A few days later, Bernard appeared in my room to confirm that a prisoner 8BA94 named Giovanni Bernini had, indeed, been murdered fifteen years into a thirty-five-year bid for arson and manslaughter at Dun Harbor Correctional.

“How do you feel?” he’d asked.

“Why, do you care?”

“Don’t be sore with me.”

“All right. I won’t be sore.”

“Another instance of her misguided way of protecting you. Ask me, this is a confirmation that what we’ve been doing has been right all along.”

“And what is it we’ve been doing?” I raised the cigarette to my lips. To sit at the kitchen table and ask this question while Bernard stood in the partial light of the vertical blinds was to create a poem. One made of time, not words. He liked to look between the blinds at the scrubby little garden, setting one back with his finger, like Harry Knott himself.

“Don’t be thick.”

“Okay,” I said.

“I’m giving you freedom,” he said.

“Okay, good,” I said with a slight smile.

“That’s right, it’s good. Freedom from being like your fuckin’ daddy, who apparently couldn’t keep his hands off another man’s cigarettes, that’s what I mean.”

Perhaps Bernard had filled me with freedom, for in that moment, as he paced in that easeful way, resting his hand in his back pocket (and in so doing slightly opening the flanks of his jacket), preparing, I knew, some diatribe, I experienced no dread. In fact, a kind of serenity — electrically charged — imbued the light tinkling of the blinds, the shard of shadow on the gray couch. Bernard, himself, but another phenomenon.

“Max probably told you I ran for Congress years ago. It wasn’t out of vanity. You of all people should know I have none. No, I ran because this country needs people who know the character of our enemies. I wanted it very badly. When people looked at me, they were looking at an idea disguised as a man. Twice I lost. Why? What wasn’t working? I asked myself again and again. Then it occurred to me.” He threw up his hands. “See, even then it had started. Senators, governors, congressmen. Aldermen, comptrollers, all the way down to the fucking garbage man — everyone, Giovanni, was an entertainer . An actor, a comedian, a tambourinist from the county grange.

“So I got into show business — the only business. Every business these days is show business. And it’s easy and it’s boring and it made me want to do a William Tell with about every last shit that walked into the Communiqué. But then I saw you.” He set his hands on his hips. “Now I hope you appreciate what we’ve all helped to do. What Frankie, Lou, and Nathan have helped me do. I don’t mean that you’re a movie star. No. Right now, I’m not talking to Giovanni Bernini, the actor, I’m talking to the spy Harry Knott, a man who has stepped out of the screen into the world. And even better, even better, yes! You’re them ”—he flung his arm in the direction of the blinds—“at any moment you could be any voter in the world, and they know it. Don’t you see how rare this is? You’re both their movie hero and them at the same time .” He smiled. “What is it you think we’re up to, Giovanni? Why stop at governor? Hell, you’re gonna run this country, for, tell me, please, who in the hell can defeat a make-believe president ?”