T. Boyle - T. C. Boyle Stories

It was. Perfectly. And twenty minutes later, with the help of an Officer Dientes, a screaming siren, and several hundred alert motorists who fell away from us on the freeway like swatted flies, I was taking the breeze on the twenty-first floor of the Sumitomo Building. Two of Peachtree’s men gripped my legs and eased my torso out onto the slick grassy plane of the building’s façade.

I was sick with fear. Before me lay the immensity of the city, its jaws and molars exposed. Above was the murky sky, half a dozen pigeons on a ledge, and Zoltan, bundled up like a sack of grapefruit and calmly perusing a paperback thriller. I choked back the remains of the croissant and cleared my throat. “Zoltan!” I shouted, the wind snatching the words from my lips and flinging them away. “Zoltan, what are you doing up there?”

There was a movement from the bag above me, Zoltan stirring himself like a great leathery fruit bat unfolding its wings, and then his skinny legs and outsized feet emerged from their confinement as the bag swayed gently in the breeze. He peered down at me, the goggles aflame with the sun, and gave me a sour look. “You’re supposed to be my agent, and you have to ask me that?”

“It’s a stunt, then — is that it?” I shouted.

He turned his face away, and the glare of the goggles died. He wouldn’t answer me. Behind me, I could hear Peachtree’s crisp, efficient tones: “Tell him he’s going to jail.”

“They’re going to lock you up. They’re not kidding.”

For a long moment, he didn’t respond. Then the goggles caught the sun again and he turned to me. “I want the TV people, Tricia Toyota, ‘Action News,’ the works.”

I began to feel dizzy. The pavement below, with its toy cars and its clots of tiny people, seemed to rush up at me and recede again in a pulsing wave. I felt Peachtree’s men relax their grip. “They won’t come!” I gasped, clutching the windowframe so desperately my fingers went numb. “They can’t. It’s network policy.” It was true, as far as I knew. Every flake in the country would be out on that ledge if they thought they could get a ten-second clip on the evening news.

Zoltan was unimpressed. “TV,” he rumbled into the wind, “or I stay here till you see the white of my bone.”

I believed him.

As it turned out, he stayed there, aloft, for two weeks. And for some reason — because he was intractable, absurd, mad beyond hope or redemption — the press couldn’t get enough of it. TV included. How he passed the time, what he ate, how he relieved himself, no one knew. He was just a presence, a distant speck in a mesh sack, the faintest intrusion of reality on the clear smooth towering face of the Sumitomo Building. Peachtree tried to get him down, of course — harassing him with helicopters, sending a squad of window cleaners, firemen, and lederhosen up after him — but nothing worked. If anyone got close to him, Zoltan would emerge from his cocoon, cling to the seamless face of the building, and float — float like a big red fly — to a new position.

Finally, after the two weeks were up — two weeks during which my phone never stopped ringing, by the way — he decided to come down. Did he climb in the nearest window and take the elevator? No, not Zoltan. He backed down, inch by inch, uncannily turning up finger- and toe-holds where none existed. He sprang the last fifteen feet to the ground, tumbled like a sky diver, and came up in the grip of a dozen policemen. There was a barricade up, streets were blocked, hundreds of spectators had gathered. As they were hustling him to a patrol car, the media people converged on him. Was it a protest? they wanted to know. A hunger strike? What did it mean?

He turned to them, the goggles steamed over, pigeon feathers and flecks of airborne debris clinging to his cape. His legs were like sticks, his face nearly black with sun and soot. “I want to be famous,” he said.

“A DC-10?”

Zoltan nodded. “The bigger, the better,” he rumbled.

It was the day after he’d decamped from the face of the Sumitomo Building and we were in my office, discussing the next project. (I’d bailed him out myself, though the figure was right up there with what you’d expect for a serial killer. There were fourteen charges against him, ranging from trespassing to creating a public nuisance and refusing the reasonable request of a police officer to indecent exposure. I had to call in every favor that was ever owed to me and go down on my knees to Sol Bankoff, the head of the agency, to raise the cash.) Zoltan was wearing the outfit I’d had specially made for him: new tights, a black silk cape without a wrinkle in it, a pair of Air Jordan basketball shoes in red and black, and most important of all, a red leather aviator’s cap and goggles. Now he looked less like a geriatric at a health spa and more like the sort of fearless daredevil/superhero the public could relate to.

“But Zoltan,” I pleaded, “those things go five hundred miles an hour. You’d be ripped to pieces. Climbing buildings is one thing, but this is insane. It’s suicidal.”

He was slouched in the chair, one skinny leg thrown over the other. “The Human Fly can survive anything,” he droned in his lifeless voice. He was staring at the floor, and now he lifted his head. “Besides, you think the public have any respect for me if I don’t lay it all on line?”

He had a point. But strapping yourself to the wing of a DC-10 made about as much sense as taking lunch at a sidewalk cafe in Beirut. “Okay,” I said, “you’re right. But you’ve got to draw the line somewhere. What good’s it going to do you to be famous if you’re dead?”

Zoltan shrugged.

“I mean already, just with the Sumitomo thing, I can book you on half the talk shows in the country….”

He rose shakily to his feet, lifted his hand, and let it drop. Two weeks on the face of the Sumitomo Building with no apparent source of nourishment hadn’t done him any good. If he was skinny before, he was nothing now — a shadow, a ghost, a pair of tights stuffed with straw. “Set it up,” he rumbled, the words riding up out of the depths of his sunken abdomen, “I talk when I got something to talk about.”

It took me a week. I called every airline in the directory, listened to a lifetime’s worth of holding jingles, and talked to everyone from the forklift operator at KLM to the president and CEO of Texas Air. I was met by scorn, hostility, disbelief, and naked contempt. Finally I got hold of the schedules manager of Aero Masoquisto, the Ecuadorian national airline. It was going to cost me, he said, but he could hold up the regular weekly flight to Quito for a few hours while Zoltan strapped himself to the wing and took a couple passes round the airport. He suggested an airstrip outside Tijuana, where the officials would look the other way. For a price, of course.

Of course.

I went to Sol again. I was prepared to press my forehead to the floor, shine his shoes, anything — but he surprised me. “I’ll front the money,” he rasped, his voice ruined from forty years of whispering into the telephone, “no problem.” Sol was seventy, looked fifty, and he’d had his own table in the Polo Lounge since before I was born. “If he bags it,” he said, his voice as dry as a husk, “we got the rights to his life story and we’ll do a paperback/miniseries/action-figure tie-in. Just get him to sign this, that’s all.” He slid a contract across the table. “And if he makes it, which I doubt — I mean I’ve seen some crazies in my time, but this guy is something else — if he makes it, we’ll have a million and a half offers for him. Either way, we make out, right?”

“Right,” I said, but I was thinking of Zoltan, his brittle limbs pressed to the unyielding metal, the terrible pull of the G-forces, and the cyclonic blast of the wind. What chance did he have?