Mark Doten - The Infernal

He says, Clients? What clients? I didn’t know you had a brother.

I say, I’m gonna have lots of clients! I say, Why are you asking about my brother?

I tell him that what he wants from me and what he’s been taking from me has nothing to do with my brother. I’m sorry I mentioned my brother! I say.

Never call me, he says. I mean it! he says.

When I mail my brother the ads, he says the word: Croatoan. I can tell over the phone he’s looking at it. He says, Are we like the men pointing at the tree? Or are we like the men who are already gone? Or the Indians that took them away?

Me: See, that’s what’s so great about it. In politics you need to be all three.

Sue always has a deck of cards. In January she gives me a Walkman.

Helen keeps me fed. She has these great pearls. I do the clasp. Helen: What a gentleman!

In March my brother asks when I can start paying him back. He asks when I’ll have the sketches for the sales kit. Because we can’t build the kit until he has my sketches.

In 1587 some men go missing.

In 1986 I’m just a kid and I watch a TV show.

Ten years later I get on a train that takes me here. Now it’s another ten years, and I have these months. The ring of sycamores, traffic cutting the ring both ways, three rings altogether. I pass from sycamore to sycamore until the rivers of light join up. I am in Dupont Circle again. I am always here — even after the Senior Advisor sets me up in the apartment, I keep coming back. Sometimes in Dupont I think: I was born here, and here I’ll die.

But it’s not. It’s not where I was born.

At the center you have the sea, the wind, the stars: all of that’s wrapped up in a big fountain. All day long the new boys tumble up from the Red Line and through the sycamores, not seeing the trees, not seeing the older boys, or the cars that stop for us. Boys in their white shirts and ties! Feeling the fountain’s spray without looking back at the sea or the wind or the stars!

For hours I move from tree to tree, until at last a light detaches itself, and a door opens. You don’t see the door, you hear it. The sound of an opening door, so smooth. The workings of a luxury vehicle, the rustling of the sycamores, the trees you know by heart. And you would stop yourself from going there, you would halt and press a hand to your head, you’d try to understand how this new story opening in front of you might fit with the other parts of your life story, if you weren’t already inside, already speeding somewhere else.

The first night of our being on this island, we took five great tortoise ENP H1O S0 PSCENNRZ2F0L07R T0 C6BXLHQFOGQ0 POQT2 # 8MY

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binders are just a stopgap. When our sales kit is complete, my company’s gonna be real.

Starting your own business changes your life, I truly believe that. You won’t even recognize me! Sue can come work for us. All the boys of Dupont Circle, they can all come work for us, either for her or for me, whichever they want. A sandwich shop, a consulting firm. Course I’ll get a reference from the Senior Advisor, I tell Helen. What choice does he have? He can find me my first clients, I say. Helen says, enunciate! Don’t slouch! She asks why I’m crying. Well, sometimes I miss my cats.

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first night of our being on this island, we took five great tortoises

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sixteen of our strongest men were tired with the carrying of one of them but from the sea side to our cabins.

In 1996 a congressman takes to me to the crypt. He pulls skateboard stickers from his briefcase, sheet after sheet: skulls, grenades, naked ladies. He asks me if I skate. I flush. Well, I had a Nash when I was a kid. Course, Nash sucks, I say. I feel so dumb! He brushes back my hair. No, no, he says. You skated.

In April Helen hands me back an overdraft letter. The color prints, the plastic binder for the brochure. These are separate transactions, two thirty-five-dollar fees. She goes in her purse.

I say, Don’t give it to me, if you do the same for the others.

She tells me shush.

I’ve had these years. I’ve tried to understand! There was a time in Dupont Circle you could keep your white shirts clean. Then not so much. At some point we switch to street clothes. It means we’re older. We wait to see if we’re picked for the press corps, but there’s so many of us. And there’s not enough slots. Sue visits us boys every day with her box of sandwiches, her water bottles. You trade in your white shirt and tie for street clothes, but somehow Sue keeps coming around. That’s a good thing! Other things aren’t good. Like the times a boy fills his bag with rocks. It’s something private that Sue and Helen can’t understand. Sometimes I think I could tell my brother. But then I think: no I can’t.

Pauly says, We still look beautiful.

Bill: But we don’t look like we did.

Sue: Doesn’t anybody play cards?

And when the wind stops at night, you hear cats’ claws rilling the sycamores as they glide from tree to tree.

After the first year, when they’re through needing us on the floor of Congress, we still hang out nearby, because sometimes they need us in the cloakroom, or the crypt. But then that’s over too — their needing us like that, in those places. So we go to Dupont Circle and that’s when we really and truly see the sycamores at last. Each night new boys show up, and Sue just shakes her head. Night after night she comes by to check on us. Boys, she says, my boys! She means all of the boys of Dupont Circle. From the very first time she says it, she’s our life-friend. But she’s always shaking her head.

In January I tell Sue that Helen has the nicest pearls. I say, maybe someday I’ll buy her some just like that.

Sue brings us water bottles and candy and I stash them. I’ve got a cubby behind a loose piece of masonry under the fountain — when no one’s looking, I open up a damp black space only my arm’s thin enough to reach in.

Most days Pauly and I trade sandwiches. Then I give Bill half.

I’m just not that hungry.

Of all the boys of Dupont Circle, I’m the slimmest one. That’s a sales point, even if some guys don’t like it. But fuck them.

In December, in the briefing room, I think: this is amazing! all these folding chairs! But I’m lost, I really am.

Helen sees how it is, and the next day she saves me a sea Z1OSS RVE XD2KW+942VFPA00SRFOG

I learn all I can from Helen. Helen’s made the press corps her world, she’s made the institution a life-friend, a life-animal. I love Helen! When she raises her hand I raise my hand, when she speaks out of turn I speak out of turn. I bring her hard candy and water bottles. I try to think up the questions she’d ask.

The briefing room doesn’t look the way you think it does. Folding chairs, a cramped little space like in the basement of any old office building, stained carpet, dinged-up paint, a boom mic they’re fishing overhead like a rat on a pole.

In January I ask my own.

Or the one the Senior Advisor gave me.

In January I ask one, just to be helpful.

That’s all we ever did in Dupont Circle — help people.

And they destroy me.

At the center of Dupont Circle the fountain sweeps up into twisting lines, the wind, the sea, the stars. Some boys walk the edge, arms straight out.

Each year boys in white shirts and ties go to auction. Congressmen hand them animal masks and make them fight: hawk vs. rabbit, seal vs. spider, cat vs. cat.

One year I fought Bill, another year Pauly.

Bill and me it brought closer. Bill and me became boyfriends.

With Pauly and me, though, it was different.