Mark Doten - The Infernal

then refute my words, but don’t pretend that this man you see before you, in this magnificent chair, with this face that looks like — looks like what? what does it look like to you? what does this face even look like to you? — don’t pretend he’s not addressing you with these words!

Let’s get the public option passed before Social Security goes bankrupt, or it will never happen.

These words are a simple truth, and you can’t refute a simple truth.

If you want a simple truth it’s that I bundled up a million bucks for the guy.

Me!

Whose daddy went to work every day in a rusted-out Ford and a mended, threadbare suit — the same suit every day, until the suit gave out at last, and he had to start all over. Sputtering and backfiring down a dirt road to sell funeral insurance, junk insurance, to poor, ignorant people, just to try to keep food on the table for himself and his boy.

One million!

Is it funny that I blurted all that out to them — to strangers — out in the corridor?

Sure it is — but first there was the raging fatigue. Then the Swede’s monkey wrench, and I didn’t feel the fatigue, not anymore, but I felt something — was it what was behind it? The monkey wrench flew in and the whole past got knocked wide open, and what was — let’s say, what was behind and beneath it came out. I mean: All these ideas came flooding, and these memories, and these images — a pink dress, a briefcase, an open car — but I couldn’t figure out the connections between them. With a flood, see, you have currents and eddies, but you don’t have connections, per se. And so there I was, first Rodem Universal, then nursing home reject, corridor, then backstage VIP, trying to make the connections.

What I ended up with was a plan. It was the plan.

Forty-six years ago some bad things happened in Dallas, and I decided to get out. I came to New York City with a briefcase, and in that briefcase was some cash — not any million dollars, but I used it to buy an ailing publishing company, rewrite its mission, and turn it around.

I made it a publisher of crime — of international crime, and I pushed from my mind everything that came before.

I had a plan for me —just like now I’ve got a plan for us —and through the plan, I became one of the most powerful figures in the industry — one who could raise for you, in seven months, over a million dollars.

I pushed from my mind what came before — I stuck to the plan. Now I have a new plan, but I also have what came before — and it’s flooding, since the monkey wrench LT#WTYOAF2 S2PKV B2L

so fast I’ll never be able to push it away. Like how Daddy and I sat on the roof and listened to the radio every night, and he explained the news we heard — that’s one thing that’s flooding.

We passed the rifle between us, taking shots at the empties we’d set up, lit candles stuck in their necks, down on the stumps.

Daddy taught me to shoot, and as good as he was, soon I was better — I could shoot the eye out of a jackrabbit from fifty yards, Daddy would say in wonder.

He was so proud of me for that — maybe only for that.

Daddy knew he’d be judged on his actions — we all would. On how we put the food on the table, but also on the choices we made at the most critical moments in our country’s history. What he did in his day-to-day was something he’d be judged for, but how he acted as a citizen was a way to atone. Korea, the Egyptian revolution, the Mau Mau uprising — Daddy worked through the stories we heard on the radio — stories of people from all these far-flung countries — and he explained to me how one should act, or should have acted, in those countries. On the roof together, the two of us listening to the radio, he explained these things for hours, until I nodded off. I’d try to fight it. I loved it up there, just listening. I don’t know that I’ve been happier than just listening to my father talk up on the roof, rifle going back and forth between us. Still I nodded off. And he said, That’s fine, then , and I crawled down and in through my bedroom window. He’d stay up for a while with his Four Roses, then go down the ladder and scout the perimeter. Those nights! In asides, or little shushes, or a play of fingers over my neck and back, he worked me through breathing and sighting and trigger control, and explained the workings of the countries we heard about — it seemed he knew every country in the world. The cool night air smelled of tar and gunpowder and a breeze off the swamp. On cold nights, there was also the smoking sweetness of the kerosene space heater he’d built a platform for on the roof’s peak, and he rested a hand on the small of my back.

I wish we’d met before. I wish that some of what I had to tell you now had already been said. I wish that you’d seen this face before — that it was one more thing we didn’t have to get through.

But you know what I think?

Here’s what I think.

It’s like Daddy used to say: The only way to get through it is to get through it.

Fat, fretting literary agents. The ad guys at magazines — those stringy game hens. I put the screw to them, as they’d been putting the screw to me for years. The freelancers were softer, more desperate; and once the current roster was squeezed dry, I combed through the files. Imagine how tightly the wallet of a proofreader you’ve not given work since the mid-’80s would be shut against you. But you have seen the checks, so you cannot doubt my tenacity — the force of my will when I know what it is I want.

I had to keep giving.

Why did I have to?

I just figured it out right now, a minute ago.

I was giving to figure out why I was giving. And unless I kept on, I would never know.

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The first check — twenty-five dollars. Let’s start there, let’s start with why I started.

It’s like I said — you were a problem.

A million years ago in the sixties I left my job at a textbook company in Dallas and opened shop here. I was through with textbooks. I didn’t know what to do, exactly, so I just picked something and I did it. And right away I had the magic touch — each series a best-seller, one after the next. They said, He’s the guy with the magic touch , and I made that magic touch my whole life — nothing else much mattered. Except — for a time — Reagan. Reagan, my god. See, there was the Washington Hilton, and what they did to him there, and I felt so bad — I thought, We should have done something to keep it from happening. So I sent a few checks, almost by way of apology. Then a few more. And then a few years later, he was done — he’d served and he was out. Did I keep giving? People were calling me, sending mail by the truckload, accosting me at industry functions they’d somehow found out about and talked their way into. No. Not a penny. As if a spell had been cast on me, I once again simply forgot about politics. And I returned to the magic touch.

But then — what? What was it? The moment came, the speech came — and suddenly you were a problem. You were my problem.

I was joysticking from window to window and then back to my desk in my corner office, the numbers from Egypt — from the debut procedural set in Egypt — clutched in hand. At the desk I’d hold down the intercom button and listen to what they were saying in publicity. It was a button I liked to press — why deny it? — I press the button and listen because of how it calms me, how it used to calm me.

On the afternoon in question, they were saying they’d seen something all new. They asked each other, How often in your life do you get to see something all new? I didn’t go online to see what they were talking about — not yet. I joysticked back to the windows, and looked down thirty floors to Bryant Park, at all those people out there on their lunch hours, or simply out — tiny people you couldn’t see worth a damn. Suit, T-shirt, man or woman, black or white, maybe that, maybe only that. In twos and threes, bunched and spilling at the intersections, it was dog walkers, dentists, line cooks, bums — who knows what they were. You imagine these things glancingly, and of course it doesn’t matter. Not to them. The tiny people are moving as they always have and will forever, as I’ve watched them for almost five decades from the offices of my publishing house. Thousands of tiny people coming and going in Bryant Park.